Sarah Benslimane

Sarah Benslimane (Besançon, France, 1997) is a French-Algerian-Swiss artist, and currently lives and works in Geneva. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Art at HEAD-Geneva and she just finished her master’s at the same institution (2023). She belongs to a generation of artists who live their lives completely within the rules of the Internet. Her work reflects the overflow of information, history, images and styles, available all at once and at everyone’s fingertips. Her sculptural paintings play tricks on the viewer’s expectations of reality, and seem to suggest clues in a puzzle that has exponentially grown out of control. Geometry, like binary computer programs built up from endless 1s and 0s, promised a clarity that has proved elusive. Yet, referencing hard-edged Minimalism and the irony of NeoGeo, her paintings blast through preconceived notions of vulgarity, sweetness, the feminine and the now, creating a physical space where naiveté, rudeness, the joke and the serious, coexist in harmony. ...

MADRAGOA is a contemporary art gallery founded in 2016 in the homonymous neighborhood of Lisbon’s historical center. Since its beginning, the gallery has been an early supporter of a number of international young artists such as Adrián Balseca, Rodrigo Hernández, Renato Leotta, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Joanna Piotrowska, and Yuli Yamagata, whose first productions and exhibition have been produced and promoted by the gallery and often presented for the first time in Portugal. Moreover, Madragoa launched the careers of young Portuguese artists such as Sara Chang Yan, Luís Lázaro Matos, Gonçalo Preto, and Jaime Welsh, giving them visibility on the international scene. From its peripheral location in Europe, MADRAGOA’s project focuses on how to set a deep conversation with the city and its extraordinary potential, setting a dialogue between global artistic practices and local craftsmanship and ideas. The gallery always created experiences of research and production for its artists locally and promotes its program also through the participation in a number of international art fairs, gallery exchanges, and exhibition projects. MADRAGOA is currently recognized as one of the most innovative realities in the Portuguese art scene, while it succeeded to obtain visibility internationally throughout its years of its activity. At the moment, the gallery actively represents artists from Portugal, Italy, Ecuador, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Brazil and South Africa. ...