Nevine Mahmoud
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2022
1988
United Kingdom
Soft Opening
foreplay III is a group of new sculptures from Nevine Mahmoud specially conceived for Liste 2022. A series of small objects referencing children’s toys and play parts are reconfigured to incorporate features of the human body. Mahmoud positions the sculptures each within a custom aluminium shelf: mechanisms designed for easy access and the impermanent storage of non-precious items. Nostalgic plastic elements are abstracted from their original form or function and hybridised into more sensuous bodily objects.
Materially, these works are constructed from an amalgam of stone, glass, resin and plaster in a conflation of both additive and reductive processes. Renderings of plush toys or supple flesh in hard stone results in an eroticised desire to touch, to see with the body instead of relying purely on visual sight. By contrast, as a material historically used in casting maquettes for bronze sculptures, plaster engenders a temporary state, a form under construction, a sketch. The juxtaposition of these materials softly amplifies a tension between the geometric forms of the toylike sculptures and the organic fluidity of the body. For Mahmoud, toys allow us to express and exercise desire. Furthermore, the material choice to use resin for certain sculptural components again straddles both an industrial material universe and an unstable, imperfect “organic” state. Unlike the fragility of glass, resin purports a specific nostalgia for permanence via its allusion to plastic, replicated toys and apparatus that children and adults alike utilise to live out limitless fantasies.
Distorting and misrepresenting the body in ways that might bring humor or gravity, lust or disgust to the viewer is the only way I can see to challenge preconceived expectations of how to live in one.
- Nevine Mahmoud
Mahmoud’s living sculptures create unexpectedly intimate encounters, like accidentally brushing against a stranger’s sweaty skin in a club, complete with the unspoken anonymous frisson. Sometimes a peach is just a peach, but not here.
- Gilda Williams, Artforum
Nevine Mahmoud (b. 1988, London UK) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BA from Goldsmiths, University of London and MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She recently had a solo exhibition, MATRIX 188 at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (2022). Last year, Mahmoud opened her first institutional solo exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park, Los Angeles. The artist also recently exhibited at the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro in Milan alongside Margherita Raso and Derek MF di Fabio in the exhibition per ...