Press — sahar khoury

New York Times Critic Pick

Sahar Khoury’s richly painted ceramic — “Untitled (middle section of my living room rug)” — reminds us that Persian rugs were frequent props in Renaissance paintings. The relief’s toothy, saw-like edges conjure the textile’s fringe in such fierce form, they also resemble the crenelations of a castle.

—Roberta Smith

Bomb Magazine

I met Sahar Khoury last summer at the Headlands Art Center in California where we were both artists in residence. After being closed for over a year for COVID-19 precautions, the residency reopened to a smaller group, and we found ourselves in a wild, rugged landscape with coyotes, owls and hawks, dense fog, and a decaying whale carcass that was on the beach for two months during our residency. Sahar’s show You Can’t Cut It into Pieces is on view at Canada in New York City until April 9.

—Anna Betbeze

Art in America

Khoury colors the reverse side of the sculpture’s blue-green surface a pale gray flecked with green and purple, and adds a thick, bending line of magenta, a dreamy take on a California sunset in winter. Here again, Khoury abstracts and interrupts what might appear to be a traditional landscape: a peach ceramic well or pool is appended near the center, and a deep amoeba-like emerald form hangs from the top left, like the canopy of another tree punctuating the sky. While one small representation of a tree lingers at lower left, the composition seems to abandon orientation, preferring a sense of atmosphere to the flipside’s emphasis on gravity.

Brooklyn Rail

Two felines stand guard in front of and over two of the sculptures, Untitled (belts with Lola sitting) (2019) and Untitled (1900-1999 with Pearl sleeping) (2019). In belts with Lola sitting, a charming makeshift tower functions as the pedestal for a bronze cast of a cat. Three red, black, and gold ceramic vessels, built with irregular protrusions and cavities, are stacked one on top of the other. The black cast bronze and irregularly modeled cat poses at the top, with her tail hovering weightlessly behind. The artist is known for sculpting her two cats, Lola and Pearl, many times, working directly from live postures and using materials such as paper and fabric to capture their rough sculptural form. However, the cats on view here present the first instance where Khoury has cast these forms in bronze, making their presence in the space heavier, more solid, and noticeable. A collection of tightly strung leather belts reinforces the sculpture. The straps and buckles interact with the vessels for utility and structural integrity, and intertwine with the colors, so that gold, red, brown and pewter surfaces are heavily present in the space…There is something alchemical about the way Khoury uses materials, and, however industrial, she prods them into feeling supple, rich, and gentle.

New Yorker

The gallery inaugurates its new Tribeca space auspiciously with a pair of enchanting solo shows. Jane’s shimmering new paintings are ultra-precise, combining an idiosyncratic Pointillism with a poetic, even romantic, engagement with math. Prime numbers, palindromic numerals, and binary codes are rendered in grids with an undulating optical effect. “The Goodnight Kiss” is a colorful, quiltlike composition, in which zeros and ones interlock in what the Massachusetts-based painter describes as a “lullaby of sameness.” Khoury’s sculptures, in the smaller gallery, are similarly playful, suggesting manic improvisation with a riot of glazed-ceramic and papier-mâché elements, accessorized or bundled together with assorted belts. One particularly charming makeshift tower provides a pedestal for a roughly modelled bronze cast of a cat.

Art Review

Khoury’s work, here shown in New York for the first time, is a wonderful surprise. The artist uses a host of materials and techniques – among them poured concrete, papier-mâché, old clothes, painting, bamboo and more – in creating her paintings and sculptures. In one of my favorite pieces, Untitled (triangle, rug pedestal) (2017), a patch of mint-green machine-made rug is sunk into the side of a concrete sculpture that resembles a line drawing of a right-angled triangle. Other patches of the concrete are tinted with light pink paint (perhaps the effect of painting into wet cement). There is something alchemical about the way Khoury uses materials here. However industrial, she prods them into feeling gentle and supple. For example, there is a series of holes in the base of the sculpture that, in Khoury’s hands, appear torn away rather than, say, drilled, which makes the stony construction material feel soft and vulnerable. I’m also taken with the way Khoury builds modes of display into the works themselves: one painting has a hanging device made of four paper shopping-bag handles that stick out of its top edge, and another hangs from a 60cm-tall bamboo triangle. An improvisational mode of problem solving is embedded into the formal qualities of the works.

https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/art-exhibits/bay-area-ceramics-scene-fired-up-in-new-ways

After a long, slow burn, Sahar Khoury has taken Bay Area art by storm in the past two years. The Oakland artist’s bracingly irreverent attitude to the traditions that bound ceramics for centuries has placed her at the top of many curatorial and collector lists, with solo shows at two different galleries, a featured position in the 2018 “Bay Area Now” exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and a recently announced SECA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. But if her adventurous approach is reminiscent of the free spirit of Voulkos, Khoury’s startling mix of media — from leather belts and steel bolts that hold sculptures together, to a ready embrace of humble materials like papier-mâché and cheap plastic — sets her apart from the master. Voulkos and other key ceramics artists of the 1950s and ’60s set out to upend convention, but they recognized its boundaries. Khoury is not incrementally revising custom; she simply ignores it.

http://artviewer.org/setting-forth-by-signs-at-interface-gallery/

https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/art-exhibits/ybcas-bay-area-now-8-a-bad-show-redeemed-by-good-art\

Khoury’s “Untitled (15 Esthers in pyramid on bone relief plinth)” (2018), placed at the center of a small fountain visible through a glass wall, is a stuttering, dreamlike vision of a fluffy little creature — a wall label tells us Esther is the artist’s dog — heroicized, an avatar of pride and empowerment. It is the standout object in the show, both for its haunting aspect and its brilliant placement.

https://www.journal.fyi/review-bay-area-now-8-ybca/

Maybe the works I was most smitten by are the sculptures of Sahar Khoury. The artist’s previous exhibitions are a decent guide as to what she has done, with metal work, ceramic, and papier-mâché, strange itinerant forms, her pets etc. all with staring roles. But her installation, incorporating the impossible space next to the stairs and the adjacent, usually unused/ignored space of the small triangular outdoor space and its pond, is exceptional as the artists practice keeps getting better and better – formally creative and super personal.

https://www.journal.fyi/bay-area-now-8-interviews/2018/8/14/sahar-khoury

https://www.vulture.com/2017/05/right-now-is-a-blockbuster-moment-for-female-artists.html

http://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Galleries-outside-the-mainstream-but-worth-the-10975439.php

Sahar Khoury’s exhibition at the Luggage Store fills a substantial gallery, and it’s a killer. By that I mean it is twisted and unpredictable in all the best ways, but also that some of her works are knifed apart. One work was finished off with gunshots. Khoury shows off a wide range of technical experiment, from hand-formed ceramic to cast cement to papier-mache. These are unconventionally combined, whether together or with scraps of found materials. The works often reference the domestic — vase forms on stands, paintings pieced together from old clothing — but they can also be abstract in unbalanced, unnatural ways. All of them are rough, some brutal, like adolescent products of a violently dysfunctional home. A gang of free-standing integers, each the height of a woman and woozily anchored by a heavy metal or poured concrete footing, occupies the center of the gallery. A handout says the work is untitled, but it sorts the numbers into spans of years (“1948/1995, 1953/1979”) that “mark nationality and memory formation in Iranian and Palestinian histories.” It doesn’t take Wikipedia to know that these were periods of instability and violence, of clashing cultures and splintered social structures.

https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2017/02/16/bay-area-sculpture-right-now-sahar-khoury-balances-hard-and-soft/

“I like the clashing of things that aren’t supposed to go together, because that feels truer to my experience than something that’s all pure.”

http://www.curiouslydirect.com/single-post/2016/03/23/Royal-Nonesuch-Gallery-Faces-and-Vases