Farah Atassi's 'Metamorphosis' at Almine Rech: A Flat-Space Painter's Show, and the Room It Needs

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 25, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Farah Atassi's 'Metamorphosis' at Almine Rech: A Flat-Space Painter's Show, and the Room It Needs At a Glance Cross-town for anyone who cares how a painting holds the line between deep space and flat pattern, but only if the gallery gives it a plain wall and flat, even light. Walk in and the first decision isn’t the painter’s, it’s the gallery’s: how much shadow the light is allowed to throw across the canvas. Get that wrong and a Farah Atassi show stops working, because these are pictures built to hover between a deep stage and a flat pattern, and a hard shadow picks a side for them before anyone has looked. That’s the room I’d be reading at “Metamorphosis,” Atassi’s show that opens at Almine Rech’s New York gallery on June 26 and runs to July 31. Atassi says her method plainly: “I do figurative painting s with an abstract painter’s language: the foundation of my work is geometric shapes.” And she builds the space on purpose, starting each canvas, in her words, “by defining a space with a roof, a horizon and a first step that sets the scene.” So every painting is a little theatre, a still life or a nude or the circus pulled from Picasso and Matisse, then pressed flat into stripes, diagonals and decorative tile until it can’t decide whether it’s a room or a rug. Why Atassi’s flat, frontal paintings fight a dramatic hang That indecision is the whole event, and light is what protects it. A raking museum beam carves real shadow into a picture that was engineered to be met head-on, flat and frontal. It forces a depth the painting was deliberately withholding, and the trick collapses into either a flat decoration or a clumsy stage set. These canvases want flat, even, frontal light. The more theatrical the gallery gets with its beams, the more it overrides the one decision Atassi spent the whole painting making. Atassi builds a stage, then flattens it. The room decides whether the trick survives. What the wall has to do for the depth-versus-pattern tension to hold The second danger is the wall itself. Her surface is already decorative, all textile motif and folk-art pattern, so hang it on a busy or coloured wall, or crowd it with neighbours, and the painting dissolves into the room as wallpaper. The figure stops climbing back out of the geometry, and that resurfacing is the thing that makes an Atassi an Atassi. She needs a plain wall and air around each work. Her canvases run big, often near two metres and pattern-dense, so they also need throwback distance: stand too close and the eye reads only the grid; give it the room and the nude or the acrobat rises back through the pattern. That is the test I’d apply walking through “Metamorphosis,” and it’s a hanging decision more than a curatorial one: plain walls, flat light, space to step back. Do that, and the depth-versus-flatness argument she’s been running for years gets to play out. Crowd it or spotlight it, and a serious painter’s problem reads as mere pattern. Verdict