About

Tomm El-Saieh’s solo museum debut features a suite of new paintings that explore and probe the meanings of abstraction by invoking Haitian traditions of figurative spiritual art.

El-Saieh’s colorful, map-like constellations are created through a frenetic process of all-over rubbing, a diverse application of material, and strategic erasures. The large-scale compositions are so full of information that the works themselves allude to the artist’s labored physical process, which could be seen as performative. Through this mode of facture, El-Saieh creates a subtly diverse range of surfaces that …