Installation view, Ebecho Muslimova: Fatebe Digest, David Zwirner, London, 2021
Ebecho Muslimova: Fatebe Digest
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by New York–based artist Ebecho Muslimova, Fatebe Digest, at the gallery’s London location.
This will be the artist’s first solo presentation in the United Kingdom.
This selection of new work will feature 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.’1
1 Ebecho Muslimova, interview by Rosario Güiraldes, The Drawing Center, New York, spring 2021, accessed online.
Image: Ebecho Muslimova, Fatebe Leaking Vessels, 2021 (detail)
Installation view, Ebecho Muslimova: Fatebe Digest, David Zwirner, London, 2021
“Many people have distorted impressions of their own bodies and consequent feelings of inferiority.… So when an artist like the gifted drawer Ebecho Muslimova creates funny, wordless cartoons of a lovably goofy, corpulent alter ego called Fatebe, we know what she’s wrestling with.”
—Ken Johnson, The New York Times
Manifesting a graphic trajectory of the personal and the exposed, the comedic and the disquieting, this selection of new work by Ebecho Muslimova features the artist’s character Fatebe, a plump and exuberant personality who subsumes the neuroses and anxieties of her creator.
Installation view, Ebecho Muslimova: Fatebe Digest, David Zwirner, London, 2021
“Muslimova began drawing the character as a pleasurable escape from the critical discourses and professional anxieties of art school.… With her extravagant abjection and cheerful onanism, Fatebe proved to be a surprisingly expressive form and inexhaustible engine of breakdown and recuperation.”
—Chloe Wyma, Artforum
Installation view, Ebecho Muslimova: Scenes in the Sublevel, The Drawing Center, New York. February 5 - May 23, 2021. Photo: Daniel Terna. Courtesy The Drawing Center.
Installation view, Ebecho Muslimova: Scenes in the Sublevel, The Drawing Center, New York. February 5 - May 23, 2021. Photo: Daniel Terna. Courtesy The Drawing Center.
Installation view, Ebecho Muslimova: Scenes in the Sublevel, The Drawing Center, New York. February 5 - May 23, 2021. Photo: Daniel Terna. Courtesy The Drawing Center.
In London, Muslimova has created a site-specific rendering of her surrogate, further expanding Fatebe’s universe to literally occupy the surrounding built environment. Similar site-specific presentations include the 2021 Belgrade Biennale and the 2021 group exhibition Smashing into My Heart at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.
Installation view from the 58th October Salon, The Dreamers, Belgrade Biennale, 2021. Photo: Nemanja Knezevic © Cultural Centre of Belgrade
Ebecho Muslimova, FATEBE BIG SQUEEZE AT COBB HALL, 2021. Installation view, Smashing Into My Heart, Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 2021. Photo by Useful Art Services.
Ebecho Muslimova, Fatebe Big Foot, 2018 . Courtesy: the artist. Anna Uddenberg, Journey of Self Discovery, 2016. Courtesy: the artist and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Photo: Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Gunnar Meier
Installation view from the 32nd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, Birth as Criterion, 2017. Photo: Jaka Babnik. MGLC Archive.
Ebecho Muslimova, Fatebe Theater Mural, 2021 (detail)
Ebecho Muslimova, Fatebe Theater Mural, 2021 (detail)
“Throughout the history of figuration the veiled female subject has signified … the impression of something behind the veil—that there is a secret pleasure hidden, a forbidden truth.… In contrast, Fatebe occupies an overabundant, visible, spectacular, and maximal body. In ‘lifting’ this veil, she embodies a pure plentitude of unbridled presence.”
—Marie Heilich, Unrealism: New Figurative Painting
Ebecho Muslimova, Fatebe Theater Mural, 2021
Ebecho Muslimova in her studio, 2021. Photo by Emiliano Granado
Installation view, Ebecho Muslimova: Fatebe Digest, David Zwirner, London, 2021
“Over the past decade much press has been given to a gendered reading of the central element in Muslimova’s work, but 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.”
—Mitchell Anderson, Flash Art
Ebecho Muslimova, Fatebe Mood Rattle, 2021 (detail)
Ebecho Muslimova, Fatebe 60° Anniversario, 2021 (detail)
Referencing Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit) (1961), Fatebe 60° Anniversario (2021) shows her commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the creation of the controversial work by the Italian conceptualist—in a celebratory but scatological display.
Ebecho Muslimova, Fatebe Burnt, 2021 (detail)
“The initial impact of the character is her shamelessness, like Adam and Eve before the fall. Fatebe’s abstracted double-circled vagina and starry asshole appear across her oeuvre, not as elements of shock but as elements seen when an active body is on view, sexually or not.”
—Mitchell Anderson, Flash Art
Ebecho Muslimova, Fatebe Slot, 2021 (detail)
“This is what Muslimova does best: she presents a situation where the viewer is hard put to figure out how Fatebe ended up in such circumstances. For all the shame and mortification her alter ego is subjected to, Muslimova never reveals the source (or points a finger), making what could easily be a didactic view into something bizarrely enigmatic.”
—John Yau, Hyperallergic
Installation view, Ebecho Muslimova: Fatebe Digest, David Zwirner, London, 2021
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