Sameen Agha | Independent New York
Independent
Spring Studios
50 Varick Street
New York, NY 10013
Fair Dates
May 8–11, 2025
Indigo+Madder is pleased to present a new installation of sculptures and oil paintings by Lahore-based artist Sameen Agha.
The works continue the artist’s ongoing exploration of ideas of catharsis and metamorphosis through emotion and materiality. The installation creates a surreal and intricate landscape, where childhood memories, motifs from nature and the domestic environment come together to examine gendered systems and the concept of home. A personal exploration of emotions and their transformative qualities on the body and self, underpins the experiments with materials, as well as the sensorial qualities expressed in the works. Scenes of joy and calm, intermingle with fear and anxiety to create a charged space.
Oil paintings framed by extensively carved white marble, appropriate motifs from lace-edged traditional clothing from South Asia to explore ideas of femininity, oppressive gendered expectations and the search for personal joy. Flora and fauna motifs in metal, marble and clay are juxtaposed with scenes of the domestic and the urban, creating a surreal terrain. Agha works extensively with pink marble, which is solid and imposing, yet pliable in texture. Its unique, mottled, bodily hues and patterns are reminiscent of skin and veins. She also utilises the material’s historical links to monuments, mausoleums and homes in South Asia, where its presence has become synonymous with monumentality, permanence and grandeur.
In Emergent desire A house rests precariously on a reptilian form, emerging from the ground, carved in pigmented marble. The work invites viewers to contemplate, in a paradoxical sense, the comfort and safety of domestic life against the potential for upheaval or discord, especially through her experiments with the schema for a home from childhood drawings. The artist carefully chooses each stone, with the sinuous lines of the marble’s surface, formed over thousands of years, under extremes of pressure and temperature, adding to the vitality of the work.
Days, nights and years, delicately framed in lacy marble, creates a scene of emergence and celebration, mapping shifts in the emotional landscape and suggesting transformation. Gently held, fragmented with blooming roses contemplate the durable, yet changeable nature of childhood memories. Agha brings together images from her childhood garden and home, to explore a sense of freedom and wilderness. An ancient prairie leading to the salt mines, an ambitious installation of marble, stone and oil on canvas, reveals a portal leading into a wild terrain. Forms in stone, that seem to be metamorphosing into wild rabbits, spill out and spread out across the space. Materials and forms shift and convert, to explore the tensions between strength and fragility; softness and solidity. Across from this, Placeless place, indicates the presence of a second portal, as yet invisible. They seem to be leading to towards new terrain, which is still hidden and unknown. A delicate bouquet of metal flowers, lodged between the handles, alludes both to a romantic gesture as well as a spiritual one, as if an offering left at an altar to the not-yet-defined.
In this mysterious landscape, there is an interplay between different elements - the sinister seems to turn into the benign and hopeful, while the serene becomes tinged with fear and desire, as the works continually subvert and transform in meaning and context.
