AWL is delighted to present Palace at 4 a.m., bringing together recent paintings by Tahmina Negmat and sculptural furniture by Mehdi Dakhli. Taking place from Monday, 12 October to Friday, 16 October, the exhibition will be presented in a gallery space in the heart of Marylebone, London, during Frieze Art Fair. AWL will host an opening reception on Monday, 12 October.
The exhibition takes its title from Alberto Giacometti's 1932 sculpture of the same name, in which multiple perspectives and ways of looking coexist — an attempt to capture the dimension of time within a single work.
The presentation marks the culmination of Tahmina Negmat's Hyperimposed Landscapes series. Her paintings inhabit a liminal spatial register, drawing on references spanning Assyrian temple architecture, the minarets of Samarra in Lower Mesopotamia, and the perceptual dissonance produced when an object is apprehended frontally while the eye is drawn into its unseen, subterranean matter. Driven by an ongoing exploration of time and how it might be felt and seen through painting, Negmat works with tactile, layered surfaces that explore cycles of violence, memory, and renewal.
Mehdi Dakhli's sculptural furniture extends this same interrogation of perspective into three-dimensional space: objects conceived to be circumnavigated, inhabited and viewed from multiple vantages, each embedding inherited symbolic and material histories within its physical form. The Sidi Bou Chair draws on Wassily Kandinsky's Loses im Rot (1925), reflecting the artist's formative visit to Tunisia and its influence on his turn toward abstraction. The Scarab Cabinet (2026) draws on Ancient Egyptian symbolism, taking the scarab as a symbol of regeneration, protection and prosperity. Across these works, Dakhli translates cultural histories and symbols into contemporary material forms.
