Sa'ad Choeb: Don Bachardy Fellowship 2022 Studio Show

Any Resemblance to Reality is Purely Coincidental

A studio show by Sa'ad Choeb

23 - 26 February 2023

Dissolution, soft pastels and oil pastels on paper, 42 x 83 cm

Sa’ad Choeb is the 2022 recipient of the Don Bachardy Fellowship. The fellowship invites a gifted and dedicated postgraduate artist from outside the United Kingdom to study at the Royal Drawing School and to experience the cultural life of London. The fellowship is named after the Californian portrait painter, Don Bachardy (b. 1934), who studied at the Slade in 1961, and went on to draw and paint over 10,000 portraits from life. 

Sa’ad Choeb is a Syrian artist who applied for the Fellowship after completing a one-year artist residency in Ashkal Alwan Center in Lebanon. He says of his time at the School - “The experience of studying at the Royal Drawing School has been foundational and liberating for my practise."

Read more about the impact of the Don Bachardy Fellowship on Sa'ad's practise on our blog.

Works on display in his studio show includes a six metre triptych and more than 50 drawings and other site specific work that has been produced during the Fellowship. The work investigates how rupture in sequence and continuation can affect visual experience, drawing inspiration from Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of motion, Picasso’s Guernica and Francis Bacon’s use of space in his figurative paintings. The effect is a vision of a world endlessly breaking apart and then reassembling as hybrid realities, never reassuringly complete nor without hope or reformulation. 

Sa'ad Choeb talks about the ways in which his approach to drawing has developed on the residency:

Any Resemblance to Reality is Purely Coincidental is open to view by appointment, Thursday 23 to Sunday 26 February, 11am - 8pm at Space Studios, 19 Warburton Rd, Hackney, E8 3RH. 

Please email saad.choeb@gmail.com to book.

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