Running

Nour Malas | Solo Exhibition

Presented by CARBON 12

Opening November 30th

DIANA is pleased to present Running, a debut solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Nour Malas. On view from November 30-December 22, 2023, this will be the artist’s first exhibition in New York. 

Running features a new series of intimately-scaled paintings on wooden panel. Movement is muse as Malas follows her forms—figures, animals, an occasional vehicle- into darkness. Opaque blacks reveal a luminous, reflective dark, shaded with shimmering tones and deep color. Drawing on the pictorial strategies of artists ranging from Edvard Munch to Mark Rothko, Malas builds her surfaces with layers of oil pigment, before scraping away with the back of her brush. Carved scrawls in paint point to the immediacy and intuition inherent in her practice; fleeting moments abound, where in the artist’s words, images “are always running away from me.” 

A departure for the artist, these works show Malas deviating from the large-scale format for which she is best known to the confines of smaller canvases. Her signature, long-form brushstrokes, traditionally frenetic threads through the composition, now appear in isolation. Enveloping skies of burnt umber and forest green yield silhouettes, untethered to ground and steered by a centrifugal, rhythmic force distinctive to Malas’ compositions. Her paintings become legible as internal landscapes, abstractions of experience that blur reality, dream, and memory, proposing an alternate space for perception where darkness is required to see.