Vardaxoglou Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition with Shaan Syed (b. 1975). This is the artist's first exhibition with the gallery.
The exhibition brings together a group of previously unseen large-scale paintings made in recent years, showing the development of Syed’s distinct visual language. Creating a tension between the graphic lines of flat hard-edge abstraction and gestural mark-making, Syed’s approach to painting is one of decoding and recontextualising visual signs and references drawn from European and American post-modern painting, married with those of his own experience and background. As the son of a Pakistani Muslim father and a British Protestant mother, growing up in Canada, Syed explores the meanings of holding certain identities and their consequent influences for creating and looking at art.