Nevine Mahmoud

Nevine Mahmoud creates luscious, abstracted sculptures of flowers, fruit, breasts and lips. Her work echoes the disembodied limbs sculpted by artists like Alina Szapocznikow and Louise Bourgeois, but with a pastel softness and liquid sensuality that is perhaps more akin to Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings. Although they glimmer and ooze as if made from syrup or hard candy, the sculptures are cast in calcite, alabaster and marble. The artist contrasts the cool and calculated solidity of stone with the warmth, softness and transmutability of body parts. Through her sculptures, Mahmoud subverts the male gaze and objectification of the female form historically favoured in the medium of stone sculpture. Positioning her sculptures in the gallery and tantalising the viewer with their tacticity, Mahmoud questions the ethics of touch and consent. By placing them on a literal pedestal, the works are granted their own agency. Again, playing with the contrast between hardness and softness, some sculptures – through their size and position – are provided visual dominance over the viewer, while others are fragile and delicate, an equally defiant modality. ...

Founded in 2018 by Antonia Marsh, Soft Opening presents UK-based and international emerging contemporary artists, and often their first solo presentations in London. Focusing on work pushing the conventional limits of medium or material, the gallery presents a wide range of media and practices. Soft Opening built its early program with projects that responded to the gallery’s unique first location in Piccadilly Circus Underground Station. Opening a second space in East London in 2019 saw programming strategy develop as Soft Opening began participating in international art fairs and representing artists. Programming is now focused at this East London space. In 2020 the gallery began publishing artist monographs - the first was with Tenant of Culture in 2020 followed by Gina Fischli in 2021 and Sin Wai Kin in 2022. ...