Majd Kurdieh: Butterflies

A solo show for the Aleppo-born Lebanese-based artist with a very distinctive practice – he paints with cartoon-like characters to talk about the current state of the world, usually a boy (Fasoon) and a girl (Fasooneh) who are always smiling despite the fact that their world is filled with hardships; they share it with a group of animal characters called the Very Scary Butterfly Gang, Their main mission is to combat the sadness of the world with their sole weapon, the flower. For the current show, Kurdieh’s fifth at Fann A Porter by our count, he’s concentrating on the butterflies: “In the hope of a future in which the field comes back laughing and the seas are more merciful, when the fires go out and the birds return to their nests, and a young painter less careless than me comes and says to you: ‘I painted the butterfly because I love the colour of its wings'”.

To 21 October.

Above: Majd Kurdieh, Untitled (2024)