Rema Ghuloum: Ether Drawings

Edward Cella Art & Architecture is pleased to announce an online exhibition featuring a new series of drawings by Los Angeles based artist Rema Ghuloum. Created over a five-week period since the shelter in place orders, the Ether drawings are a result of Ghuloum’s adaptation of her fluid yet intuitive creative process to create a single small format work daily. Like a form of daily meditation, the intimate, small-format drawings are made through a process of layering marks of color and then sanding the surface to expose the history of their creation. Marking an unprecedented moment, the Ether drawings evoke the emotional progress for the artist reflecting both presence and absence simultaneously.

Recognized for her abstract paintings that emerge from a slow buildup of the surface with wet and dry paints and intensive intervals of sanding; Ghuloum returned to drawing after having her son in September 2019. Continuing an aspect of her practice that has ebbed and flowed since 2008; Ghuloum states, “I was thinking about the transformative experience motherhood was. I felt more present than ever before, while also feeling disconnected to my body, caring for another being. I began to view my earlier drawings as a premonition. Drawing became an immediate way to connect with myself again.”

This series of drawings took on a new, urgent meaning after the Covid-19 pandemic. Sheltering in place with her family, Ghuloum felt that making a drawing a day was vital. Ghuloum reflects, “Ether represents the energy that occupies everything, breath. It is also the feeling of uncertainty, anxiety, a thought, the desire for light, beauty, touch, and connection. These drawings have become a way of communicating intimately to others. They are records that hold space. I view them as offerings. Making them daily has been a form of meditation. Sharing them with others on Instagram, has been a way to touch someone through the screen.”

ABOUT REMA GHULOUM

Rema Ghuloum currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BFA from California State University, Long Beach in 2007 and her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2010. Ghuloum received the Davyd Whaley Foundation Artist-Teacher Grant this year, and she received a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2018. Her previous awards include the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, and a recipient of the Esalen Pacifica Prize, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and the Max Gatov award. Rema has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as Edward Cella Art & Architecture, Los Angeles; Hawthorn Contemporary, Milwaukee; Et al. Gallery, San Francisco; JAUS, Los Angeles; The Front, New Orleans; Cue Foundation, UCLA's New Wight Gallery, Sonce Alexander Gallery, and George Lawson Gallery. Ghuloum concurrently curated an online exhibition entitled, poem from home, for the LA project space, Jacob’s West.