Francis Irv is pleased to announce the opening of Osama Al Rayyan’s Poets or Poems. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in New York.

Can a painting be a poem and its author a poet? Can a painting be a poet and its subject a poem? Can a painting be a poem and its subject a poet? Can a painting be a poet and its author a poem?

The paintings of Osama occupy this ambivalence. The formal structure of the work and the figures that populate it have no separation. There is no before and after, no setting, no narrative, no dialect of allusions. Yet, there are precise elements that make the paintings: There is speed, or what we perceive as speed, and the confidence in their making—the paintings are built. Then, there is air; things breathe, but an air that has crystallized, a very dense air, like honey or resin turning into amber.

For this show, straight lines have surfaced more prominently. They delimit a space, offering a more defined per- spective. Often, we are on the other side; the lines cut the space horizontally, turning into a wall or containment device. The lines keep us out or keep them in. The lines are a formal expedient, looking as if they were used to clean up the brush from loaded color or just to slice. I think they are purely ways to deal with the space of the canvas—and the artist, when asked, was of the same opinion. But as much as the structure and the subjects have such a strong bond, this cannot be said about the viewer who sits outside while the figures in the paintings turn their backs, or just look away.

- Giangiacomo Rossetti

 


Osama Al Rayyan (b. 1995, Damascus) lives and works in Basel. Selected solo exhibitions include Braunsfelder, Cologne (2024); Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2024); Galleria Federico Vavassori, Milan (2022, 2021); Magic Stop, Lausanne (2022). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Francis Irv, New York (2024); Ex-Cinema Eldorado, Lausanne (2023); Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich (2023); Mendes Wood DM at d’Ouwe Kerke, Retranchement (2023); suns. works, Zurich (2022); Galleria Federico Vavassori, Milan (2022); Sonnenstube, Lugano (2022); Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2021 & 2019); Riverside, Basel (2021).

Osama Al Rayyan
Untitled
2025
Oil on canvas
31½ x 20⅞ in.
80.00 x 53.00 cm

Brunette Coleman, London and Francis Irv, New York are pleased to present a duo exhibition of new works by Rachel Fäth and Zazou Roddam on the occasion of Condo London, 2025. Rachel Fäth debuts a new series of work entitled Lockers. Composed of discarded steel scraps, their sculptural form is determined by the size constraints of the storage lockers at a community workspace, each work a negative impression of a locker’s interior. Zazou Roddam sources her material through various public auctions and salvage yards, using unconventional modes of preservation to retain evidence of the objects’ previous owners. Through a playful manipulation of form, Roddam questions how and what we attribute significance to.


Rachel Fäth (b. 1991, Berlin) lives and works in New York. Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include le vite, Milan (2024); Francis Irv, New York (2023); diez, Amsterdam (2023); Shahin Zarinbal, Berlin (2022); Loggia Loggia, Munich (2022); Mauer, Cologne (2022). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Francis Irv, (2024); le vite, Milan (2024); Kai Matsumyia, New York (2023); New Jörg, Vienna (2023); Shahin Zarinbal, Berlin (2022); Kunstverein Munich, Munich (2022); Lomex, New York (2022); Haus Wien, Vienna (2021).

Zazou Roddam (b. 2000, London) lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include: Hans Goodrich, Chicago (2024), Brunette Coleman, London (2023), 126 Eldridge Street, New York (2023).

Francis Irv is pleased to present an exhibition by Benjmain Echeverria for the 2024 edition of Paris Internationale.

Echeverria’s process is one rooted in the revisiting of his archive – both an archive of physical, half-formed paintings and also a record of motifs and gestures, subject to the same distortion and recycling across his oeuvre. Paintings are finished and finished again, cutting and recomposing one ending into another beginning, a process through which the effacement and subsequent rehabilitation of the canvas becomes a recursive exercise. Within each successive re-articulation of the painting, the previous compositions exist within the present as traces of themselves. Through this process, Echeverria’s paintings evoke the process by which time is perceived, as both an accumulation of each past moment and a wholly singular moment at once.

Benjamin Echeverria (b. 1980, Waterloo, IA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Selected solo exhibitions include Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt am Main (2024, 2021); Francis Irv, New York (2023); Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (2022); Pose Falls, Bad Reputation, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Cups, Parapet Real Humans, St. Louis (2020); C.A.R., Green Drawing, Willie Mays, The Terror of Evidence, 3939, No Smoke, Bubbler, Corners Brought to Middle, Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt am Main (2019). Selected group exhibitions include A String of Tongueless Bells, Francis Irv, New York (2024); Models, Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2024); Warm Invitations, Gattopardo, Los Angeles (2024); The Bower, Overduin & Co., Los Angeles (2023); Piano sale going on somewhere, Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (2023).

Everywhere glass, steel.
Everywhere pigeon, rat, roach.
What is the same here,
same everywhere.
Friend. Recognize.
Coca cola same.
Wristwatch same.
Street corner same.
Delivery!
French words, English words.
Equal, OK. I say, OK.
Café American.

He goes....
He goes hahaha, you can’t go like that.
No. Don’t be no, OK.
Don’t be lovely, OK.
Be not OK, be not one more window,
one more door.
Up, outside, everything up.
They say, he says,
all rise must fall. All born must die.
All this flatten to an inch, made of screws anyway,
made of pieces.
Everywhere then, return to pieces.
Sorry!
Walk, you see,
walk know the way,
rent don’t pay, haha, OK.
Landlord dead, someday. We pray.
Uptown, the Yankees play,
Bronx River Parkway.
Angry, angry, every day.
Where I come to, they arrive,
they know.
War away, here OK.
For now we, they,
we know the weather.
We know the wind blows;
we know ocean air not too far away.
We know, OK,
freedom reign for those who pay.

Here!
Outside!
Downstairs!
Buzzer?
They go. Door Slammed!
Angry now, don’t you be grateful,
Kingdom Come, they say,
all is done.

Don’t say everywhere steel.
Everywhere glass.
You are here, around.
Everyone.
First breath, last breath.
Everywhere.
Dark, then light, then dark.
Same second, same pulsing second. Same hour.
Everyone idiot. Beautiful, beaming idiot.
Stand. Sit.
Always return
Always rent free from then.
Always, occurring. Until never.
Never was. Never once. Not at all.

Win McCarthy
Dynamism of a Yellow Van
2024
Epson 770 Ultrachrome ink, adhesive silver foil, foamboard, dibond mount
33¼ x 77 in.
84.45 x 195.58 cm