ART CITIES: London-Ebecho Muslimova – dreamideamachine ART VIEW

When Ebecho Muslimova first started drawing the character “Fatebe”, it was as a joke and a distraction from art school critique. The artist creates paintings and works on paper that beguile the eye as much as they humor the mind. Fatebe’s physical contortions and unpredictable quandaries play themselves out like performances on the canvas: each work depicts a single event that uncannily combines self-consciousness, comedy and vulnerability.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

Ebecho Muslimova’s technical prowess as a painter helps to underscore the sheer delight of Fatebe’s misadventures. “As her life continues, Fatebe is faced with newly articulated objects, stretched over landscapes that are populated with new temptations and ghosts. With adoring precision, Muslimova codifies the echoes of domesticity, luxury, nature, education, psychology, fetish, and art itself—images that have the capacity to haunt her. In, “Fatebe Digest”, her first solo presentation in the United Kingdom, Ebecho Muslimova presents new works, the selection features Muslimova’s character Fatebe, a plump and exuberant personality who subsumes the neuroses and anxieties of her creator. Fatebe was first conceived during the artist’s days as an undergraduate at Cooper Union in New York. Muslimova’s surrogate shamelessly manipulates her naked body into unimaginable contortions and is found in slapstick and at times abject situations. Set in fantastical painted landscapes or rendered solo in flowing brushwork, Fatebe explodes the social expectations of the female body through brazen displays of sexuality, vulnerability, and humour. As the artist observes, ‘This performance, this slippage through the challenges I constantly make for [Fatebe], is what interests me and pushes the search for new scenarios. In Muslimova’s recent drawings, Fatebe continues to cavort through various scenes with loose-limbed self-possession. Referencing Piero Manzoni’s “Merda d’artista” (1961), “Fatebe 60° Anniversario” (2021) shows her commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the creation of the controversial work by the Italian conceptualist. Appearing, in Muslimova’s words, as the “representative of any mental drama [she is] experiencing”, the character splits into interior and exterior selves in “Fatebe” Burnt” (2021) and “Fatebe Inner Peace” (2021). Splaying her legs wide open, she relieves herself while perched on a fluted pedestal. Muslimova inserts Fatebe into the domestic sphere: She hangs enthusiastically from her backside on a coat rack. Her body is neatly divided by USM modular furniture. In these depictions, Fatebe both is and is more than the expression of a joke. As the artist Mitchell Anderson writes, ‘the varied executions, placement, and scale are also central to a total project that reflects on the ridiculousness of life and art and the ways in which one manages to physically and emotionally survive”. Muslimova has created two paintings on canvas of Fatebe for the exhibition. Having introduced her in this medium four years ago to incorporate color and texture into the character’s world, Muslimova further expands Fatebe’s universe to literally occupy the surrounding built environment. In The Upper Room, Muslimova has created a site-specific rendering of her surrogate in a presentation similar to recent inclusions in the 2021 Belgrade Biennale and the 2021 group exhibition “Smashing into My Heart “at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 24 Grafton Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 23/11-23/12/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com