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Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to present the New York premiere of Hassan Hajjaj's celebrated My Rockstars series featuring exuberant and playful mixed media portraits of performers, musicians and friends of the artist taken all over the world. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.
In his series My Rockstars, Hassan Hajjaj pays tribute to the individuals by whom he has been artistically inspired, capturing a range of international performers, from recording and visual artists such as Hank Willis Thomas, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Cardi B., to less known music bands like Arfoud Brothers and Nigerian singer-songwriter Keziah Jones. From the year 2000, Hajjaj has photographed these figures in colorful pop-up studios constructed from textiles and plastic mats typical of Morocco and North Africa, which he sets up in the streets of London, Marrakesh, Dubai, Kuwait and Paris. Outfits designed or styled by the artist, including custom suits, shoes and hats, pop with loud colors and dazzling patterns, empowering his subjects to explore larger-than-life personas before the camera. Each portrait is bordered with a custom handcrafted frame outfitted with miniature shelves and actual consumer products, such as cans of tomato sauce, car paint tins and soda cans, often with Arabic logos. The products are chosen for their origins, names, content as well as colors and aesthetics. The uninterrupted border of commercial packaging and corporate logos mimics with irreverent Warholian flare the repetitive motifs framing traditional Islamic mosaics and offers clues about the subject of each photograph.On View through may 29
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Sarah Perles Gazin', 2015/1436
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“I personally find it complicated to describe myself or my ethnicity. Portuguese dad, moroccan mom, born in France, grew up in Spain, France, England, Portugal etc… I mean, what should I say? My job is to be all of them, and many more. Let’s not reduce ourselves to an ethnicity. We are here, we exist and we enrich the world with our diversity and our life experiences.”
- Sarah Perles
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Hank Willis Thomas, 2018/1440
"Being photographed by Hassan is a singular experience. Stepping on set you do feel like a rockstar, not as celebrity musicians, or in the western conception, but the ebullience and the flamboyance that comes with the sensation of embodying a rockstar sensibility. Being ensconced in the vibrance of Hassan’s work plays with the idea of identity, who gets to feel like a rockstar, and celebrates it in all its forms."
- Hank Willis Thomas
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"Sharing even a little slice of one’s own culture goes a long way to making a more creative and harmonious world."
- Che Lovelace
Che Lovelace Standin', 2012/1433
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"Hassan’s work embodies everything that inspires me. His work is a celebration of hybridity, a subversion of expectations, and the creation of a home from a cultural no-man's land. It's an honour to be part of this. "
- Riz Ahmed
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For Kesh Angels, modern-day women pose with their motorbikes in colorful hijabs and counterfeit designer djellabas in the bazaars of Marrakech, or are staged like comic book superheroes against vividly colored plastic mats or woven textiles. Shot from a low angle, Hajjaj presents his characters as larger than life, shattering stereotypical notions of North Africa which have their roots in Orientalist imagery, such as the common trope in art of the reclining odalisque.
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Hassan Hajjaj photographed by Jenny Fremont
A solo exhibition of Hajjaj's VOGUE, The Arab Issue is concurrently on view at Fotografiska New York. Hajjaj’s works are represented in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Farjam Collection, Dubai; Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunis; Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; Musée d’Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden, Marrakesh; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, among others. Hajjaj was born in 1961, in Larache, Morocco, and currently lives and works between London and Marrakesh.
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Please direct all press and sales inquiries to Alissa Schoenfeld
All artworks featured © Hassan Hajjaj, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Neon Design © Hassan Hajjaj and Ebon Heath | Tapedeck Design © Hassan Hajjaj and Jean Feline