All my plants are dying on me, 2024; Oil and graphite on canvas; Image by Ian Vecchiotti. Courtesy of the artist and PATRON.



PATRON is proud to announce No words attached, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with New York-based artist Nour Malas. Raw gestures of oil, pastel, graphite, and charcoal, Malas’s paintings and works on paper are journalistic impressions recording the fragile reality of daily life.

For Malas, who came of age during regional instability, existence is marked by the desire for a place to call home “…my work is completely entangled with the foundation of collapse and instability, the act of searching without necessarily finding anything.” Following her study of sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Malas has developed a unique nontextual language of which stretched linen, canvas, and paper are building blocks. Driven by a need to process her own experience, Malas’s habitual studio practice is driven by a constant revisiting, questioning and translating. Urgent physical reactions to the emotive and the mundanity of her own life, Malas’s works are the result of emotional and physical release.

No words attached represents a body of work developed over the course of two months earlier this year. Materially and emotionally resonant of that chapter of life, Malas’s organic material palette is that of daily life coffee grinds, skin, egg yolks, cigarettes, flowers. Intimate spaces, moments, or memories are turned over and recalled in order to be understood
through the marks they inspire. Gestural lines conjuring two turned faces are repeated over three pastel on paper works, a response, or answer to a confrontation, and impasse, a non resolution. Two beds face each other in Certified Homewrecker receding into the linen material like a distant memory, or the germination of an emotion or moment which has been excavated and kneaded through an active, ongoing act of seeking.

Nour Malas