Dirimart is pleased to present Immersion, Fahrelnissa Zeid’s first UK gallery exhibition this century, following her 2017 institutional retrospective at Tate Modern. The exhibition provides a concentrated insight into the most innovative years of Zeid’s five-decade practice, from the 1940s to 1960s, featuring works created in Istanbul, London, Paris, and Ischia. Spanning figuration and abstraction, the works showcase the artist’s energetically expressionist style across paintings, gouache drawings, sketches and prints, ranging from imposing, large-scale compositions to intimate miniatures.
Fahrelnissa Zeid’s artistic process was guided by a spiritual understanding of art as an ‘inner necessity’, a means of psychic survival during periods of despondency. She began her career in the 1940s, producing portraits, genre scenes, landscapes, still lifes, and urban scenes in an expressionist style.
Her subsequent twenty-year abstract turn encompasses diverse periods and approaches, including maximalist, kinetic compositions of a lyrical expressionist character. Her muted works are equally intense, structured through thick impasto and assertive palette-knife marks. In the late 1960s, she revisited figuration through portraiture, while also producing ‘anti-sculptures’ composed of coloured polyester resin blocks encasing painted animal bones.
Immersion offers an intimate setting in which to explore Fahrelnissa Zeid’s vast body of work in depth. Focusing on a select range of styles and themes, the exhibition brings together rarely seen works alongside well-known masterpieces. Anchored by gestural abstract compositions, the exhibition presents their figurative antecedents from the 1940s, alongside a notable portrait from the 1960s.
The artist’s sustained exploration of colour through shifting juxtapositions is evident in abstracts from the 1950s and 1960s. Her lifelong attraction to selfhood-annihilating universes is conveyed in works manifesting her fascination with immersive vortexes, maritime realms, and astral landscapes.
The otherworldly Aquatic Depths (Sea Cave) beckons from the street-facing window with a lush palette of blues and greens. Depth is generated through modulated colour and a surface criss-crossed in parts with a palette knife. Its dual perspective evokes the depths of the sea both from above and from within, at once confronting and engulfing the viewer. Maritime fauna appear to rise upwards: translucent blue skin encases a fantastically red thoracic form, its head shaped like a breast. This work belongs to an intense period of renewal, when the artist first summered on the island of Ischia in the early 1960s.
Ischia Terra Incognita renders an enveloping, incandescent evening sky, transformed by fireworks into a red and yellow maelstrom that reflects across the sea and merges with its blue depth. Despite its fluidity, the composition recalls Fahrelnissa Zeid’s monumental, kaleidoscopic evocations of the sublime.
Positioned opposite, the commissioned ‘portrait’ of Alice in Wonderland belongs to the artist’s primitivist phase. She magisterially reimagines Alice’s dreamlike fall into the rabbit hole as a nightmarish entrapment within a hellish vortex. Illuminated by raging reds, whirling flares and rows of menacing flashes, a distorted figure is enclosed within a volatile, infernal space.
These works are followed by three abstract works: Depth, a sunnier take on the primitivist phase, and Storm and The Search, which explore engulfing realms of blue and red through loose, gestural paint and palette-knife applications.
The extraordinarily painterly portrait of the artist’s son, Raad Zeid, exemplifies her synthesis of figuration and abstraction. The surface of the face is so vigorously layered that it oscillates between the appearance of an unknown planetary landscape and an exploration of translucent colour and texture.
Commanding the basement galleries is Adam and Eve and the Broken World, first exhibited in 1948 at Gimpel Gallery, London. Earlier that year, Fahrelnissa Zeid experienced a visual epiphany during her first transatlantic flight, when the receding landscape of agricultural fields dissolved into parcelled grids.
This painting is contextualised by earlier works from the mid-1940s, when her public career began. These paintings reflect her life at the time: prolific studio production and en plein air practice, swimming in the Bosporus, and the recherché decoration of her home. Her characteristic gestural dynamism is already evident, with animated, flattened perspectives enveloping the pictorial space.
In My Summer House, Büyükdere, carpet motifs evoke the teeming depths of a seabed, competing with the equally animated patterns of a yellow tablecloth scattered with metal and coral Buddhas. As in Hammam, the vivid accumulation of objects and writhing bodies admits no relief through light or shadow; instead, each colour plane appears intrinsically luminous.
In Fish, the orange and black tablecloth print complements the yellow stripe of the carpet, generating an incongruously vivid dynamism within a kitchen still life that is anything but still. Bosporus conveys the immersive abandon of swimming, its canvas filled with undulating, sensuous blue forms that extend from the sea’s surface into trees and clouds.
Fahrelnissa Zeid accorded equal importance to works on paper in her exhibitions, holding three print-focused exhibitions in Europe in the 1950s. Immersion therefore presents a selection of such works: prints created in lithograph workshops that reveal the artist’s fascination with the cosmos through nocturnal worlds of bi-colour grids and astral eruptions, alongside richly worked gouaches exploring all-over compositions of colour and line. Also included are a rare, kaleidoscopic sketch and a stencil from a book of prominent artists’ pochoirs.
In 1950, the artist reflected on her practice: ‘I am a means to an end. I transpose the cosmic, magnetic vibrations that rule us. I am not a pole, a centre, a self, a somebody. I act as a channel for that which should and can be transposed by me.’ Inviting viewers to engage directly with this exalted sensitivity and her fiercely inventive visual language, Immersion can be viewed at Dirimart London from 21 April to 30 May 2026.
