Doa Aly

Drawing #128

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Doa Aly, Drawing #128, 2018, Pencil on cotton paper, 95 x 60 cm. Art Jameel Collection. Photo courtesy of the artist and The Gypsum Gallery.

Artwork Details

Artist

Doa Aly

Title

Drawing #128

Date

2018

Medium

Pencil on cotton paper

Dimensions

95 x 60 cm

Credit Line

Art Jameel Collection

Work Description

Doa Aly’s work, spanning the mediums of drawing, video and performance, focusses on the use of anatomy, movement and literature to explore themes of control and alienation. In 2007, Aly started a series of sequential pencil drawings based on anatomical illustrations of the bones of the human skull, as they appear in the 25th edition of Henry Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body (1949), edited by Charles M Goss, published by Lea and Febiger, Philadelphia). The series organically evolved to reflect the artist’s interest in literature, performance and ritual, beginning with depictions of dancers’ limbs, portraits of performers in her videos, schizophrenic patients, Victorian post-mortem photography found online, and characters from mythology and literature such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 

Primarily line-based, Aly adeptly controls pressure, motion and a generative friction between pencil and paper, her terse, maze-like drawings of repeated patterns reflect a pursuit to discover pure form, with drawing itself as the ultimate subject, reflecting on the inherent problem of drawing: that to draw something is essentially to make it disappear. As her practice evolved to become more abstract and complex as seen in Drawing #128, she made numerous variations of the outlines of the anatomical drawings, playing with the endless possibilities of size, density and shapes, exploring the process of layering and the complexity of the accumulations, which she felt resonated with compulsive thinking and obsessive gestures as symptoms of schizophrenia. The accumulation of wandering lines in search of their original forms compose a web of vanishing points and intensities, simultaneously forming, deforming, and transforming.

Artist Biography

Doa Aly (b.1976, Cairo, Egypt) lives and works in Cairo

Doa Aly is a visual artist, choreographer, filmmaker and writer. With a BFA in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Cairo (2001), she is interested in movement, language, narrativity, abstraction, and repetition as tools to penetrate themes of madness, holiness and violence. Over the years, her work has evolved into a research-based practice generating multiple outcomes across numerous media, unfolding through the deconstruction, reinterpretation and re-appropriation of various sources, drawn from literature, history, and current events. Aly was shortlisted for the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2017) and has had solo exhibitions at the Townhouse, Cairo (2013); Gypsum Gallery, Cairo (2013) and Darat al Funun, Amman (2010). Her work has been exhibited as part of group shows worldwide including Bard College, New York (2017); Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival, Cairo (2016); La Loge, Brussels (2016-2017); The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2015) and The Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2015), among others.

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