Night Shade I (framed)

Night Shade I, 2020

Oil on Tissue Paper

195 x 180mm

Zarah Cassim is a painter concerned with notions of perception. She uses the mediums of painting and photography to affect a viewer’s encounter with spatial illusion and reflect the creative filter through which she views the world. Woven into the theme of unveiling the artifice of reality, is a concern with natural forms and spaces. It is in natural forms that she finds the vehicle for a sense of disorientation: the reflection of a chaotic or absurd world, which marks a breaking point for the human condition. Each work is a personal reflection for Cassim: a sensitive, romantic memory. Some of her surfaces revel in the flat beauty of the painted mark, inviting the viewer to be seduced by the texture and material of her tool of illusion. Other works evoke a dream-like, ungraspable landscape that threatens to dissolve at any concrete claim over form. Cassim graduated with an Honours in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town in 2014. She currently lives and works between Paris and Cape Town.

SELECTED PROJECTS & EXHIBITIONS

2021 - Winner of PicknPay Futurewear Competition, South Africa. Smalls Exhibition - Otomys Contemporary. Biophilia Group Show - Cavalli Estate. To Whom it May Concern - Salon91. Co-Founder of Hotel Hernandez Art School 2020 - Cape Town Art Fair, Salon 91, Cape Town; A Hazy Shade of Winter, group exhibition, Salon 91, Cape Town; Otomys Contemporary, group exhibition, Melbourne. 2019 - Cape Town Art Fair, Salon 91, Cape Town; Eastbourne Commission, Otomys Contemporary, Melbourne; Draw Art Fair London, Otomys Contemporary, UK; Mango Farm, Solo Exhibition, Salon 91, Cape Town; Wildflowers, group exhibition, Salon 91, Cape Town. 2018 - AAF, group exhibition, London; AAF, group exhibition, Brussels; AAF, group exhibition, Hong Kong; The Grand V, Rust-en-Vrede Gallery, Cape Town; Turbine Art Fair, Salon 91, Cape Town; Cape Town Art Fair, Salon91 Booth; Folklore, group exhibition, Salon 91, Cape Town; The Other Art Fair, Los Angeles; Art Hamptons, Envie D’Art; Otomys’s Gallery, Melbourne. 2017 - Trees Make Forests, end-of-year group exhibition, Salon91; The Guise of Reality, a solo exhibition at Salon91; The Other Art Fair, New York; Turbine Art Fair with Salon91; Nano 1.1, group exhibition at Barnard Gallery; Affordable Art Fair: New York, Stockholm, London, Amsterdam, Singapore. 2016 - KKNK, Absa Gallery. 2015 - Finalist, ABSA L’Atelier; Turbine Art Fair with Salon91; These Spaces/These Places, solo exhibition at 99Loop; Paint It Black, a group exhibition of young South African painters, Salon91; Stellar, an end-of-year group show, Salon91. 2013 - Finalist, Sasol New Signatures.