Category: Uncategorized

Bradley Ertaskiran is delighted to announce representation of Dawit L. Petros.

The work of Dawit L. Petros is informed by studies of global modernisms, theories of diaspora, and postcolonial studies. Throughout the past decade, he has focused on a critical re-reading of the entanglements between colonialism and modernity. These concerns derive from lived experiences: Petros is the child of Eritrean emigrants, and spent formative years in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Kenya before settling in central Canada. The overlapping cultures, voices, and tenets of this constellation produced a dispersed consciousness, global and transnational in stance and outlook. His works aim for an introspective and textured analysis of the historical factors that produced these migratory conditions. Petros installs photographs, moving images, sculptural objects, and sound work according to performative, painterly, or site responsive logics. Moving between the works echoes the extensive travel taken to produce them; while recurrent visual or formal devices quietly indicate the complex backdrops against which his projects are set

Dawit L. Petros, born in Eritrea, lives and works in Montreal and Chicago. He holds an MFA in Visual Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University, Boston, a BFA in Photography from Concordia University, Montreal, and a BA in History from the University of Saskatchewan. Recent exhibition venues include the University of Buffalo Art Galleries, Buffalo (2020), The Power Plant, Toronto (2020), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Chicago (2020), Oslo Kunstforening, Oslo (2020), 13th Biennial of Havana, Matanzas (2019), Huis Marseille Museum of Photography, Amsterdam (2018), Addis Foto Fest, Addis Ababa (2018) and Prospect.4 New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans (2017). His works have been recognized with awards including an Independent Study Fellowship at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and an Artist Residency at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Dawit L. Petros’ first solo exhibition with Bradley Ertaskiran will occur in September 2021.

Bradley Ertaskiran is delighted to announce representation of Shaan Syed.

Shaan Syed’s paintings are thorough investigations into simplified forms, texture and colour. He employs a distinctive palette repeatedly into often large-scale paintings that become ongoing series. His paintings are recognizable in their tension between the graphic lines of hard edge abstraction and gestural and personal mark making. Syed layers paint, saw-dust, and, at times, plaster onto the surface of the canvas in order to build up texture, while subsequently pulling it off and forcing it into neat and tightened up lines and sections. He often scrawls his name or words documented over time into the canvas in English and Arabic, literally inserting himself and his personal narrative into a tradition of modern abstraction. Shaan Syed was raised in Canada in a new immigrant family by a Protestant British mother and a Muslim Pakistani father, this upbringing provided insight into how the act of seeing is constantly in flux and dependant on context.  He recently began painting a repeated motif of a step, originating from a picture of the giant spiral staircase that forms the minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq.

“The use of the step initially came about from a desire to divide the canvas. By dividing, I set up a problem of configuring two sides back together. I was drawn to the minaret because it is a cultural signifier; a nod to my own personal upbringing, and one that I am using to explore the shifting nature of seeing.”

– Shaan Syed.

Shaan Syed was born in Toronto (1975), he lives and works in London, UK. Syed holds a master’s degree in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College in London and a diploma in Fine Arts from OCAD in Toronto, ON. Recent solo exhibitions include Thank you India, Goodbye Pakistan, Hello England at FREEHOUSE, London UK, Maghrib at Parisian Laundry, Montreal, I & I at Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland; Licking Forward Tangerine at noshowspace, London; and CAPITAL! at Michael Janssen Gallery, Berlin. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including The Other Side at Power Plant, Toronto; Here at the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto; Sam Windett and Shaan Syed at Patrick De Brock, Knokke; Manuel Graf and Shaan Syed at Herrmann Germann Contemporary, Zurich and The Violet Crab at the David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF), London. Syed has received awards and scholarships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Elephant Trust UK, Arts Council England, the Canada Council for the Arts, and Jerwood Contemporary Painters UK. In 2018/19, Syed founded and ran Aqbar, a temporary gallery space in East London where he invited his peers to show one painting per exhibition. Syed’s upcoming solo exhibitions include Nuno Centeno Gallery, Portugal.