Farah Atassi

Farah Atassi, Building the City, 2013, oil and glycerol on canvas, 78 3/4 x 63".

Those familiar with Farah Atassi’s work will recognize in her latest group of paintings the strong orthogonal lines that lend themselves well to her signature tiled and bricked interiors. Adhering to an underlying grid, Atassi meticulously uses tape and layers of oil paint to construct eerily unpopulated human-scale spaces. But whereas earlier paintings featured scant domestic objects—for instance, a cluster of chairs or a dangling light fixture—evoking a kitchen or a bathroom setting, recent works show the artist moving toward greater abstraction. Now exploring the grid as a modernist concept—though without entirely abandoning recognizable objects—Atassi banishes a realistic sense of time and place from her compositions and turns her attention to geometric shapes and patterns. Refreshing the rote problematic of the flat canvas, Atassi’s painted graphic

— Mara Hoberman