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.