Farah Atassi is known for revisiting some of the major themes of modern and contemporary painting in her pulsating compositions. These range from still life to the mechanical ballet and, more recently, the relationship between the model and the artist. Yet no model has ever posed for Atassi. Instead, she plays with the archetype of a model. Created in Atassi’s mind out of an art historical vocabulary, the figures in her spellbinding works are all made up. Same for the artists’ studios and the other settings they inhabit. None of these spaces or objects belong to Atassi’s everyday life. Appropriating a vocabulary of geometric, pared-down modernist forms and references, her paintings are unshackled from any representational logic.

— Devika Singh

Senior Lecturer in Curating at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was previously Curator, International Art at Tate Modern.