Driss Ouadahi takes on fences in latest exhibit

Ever since Todd Hosfelt first exhibited the Algerian painter Driss Ouadahi’s work in a Hosfelt Gallery solo exhibition in 2007, he has been captivated by the repetitive geometry of Ouadahi’s urban imagery — his anonymous gridded cityscapes and seemingly endless labyrinthine subway tunnels.

Yet Hosfelt, who was introduced to Ouadahi’s work by German architectural painter Stefan Kürten, says his understanding of Ouadahi’s work shifted significantly several years ago when he received in the mail “two small, simple paintings from Driss of fences, which he’d done with tiny, meticulous brushstrokes.”

Looking at that fencing, suddenly I saw that his entire body of work to date, the high-rise facades and brutalist concrete buildings, were all connected by the idea of how our built environments are constructed to shut people out, to keep people from one another.

In Ouadahi’s most recent body of work, he has created stirring large-scale photo-realistic depictions of chain-link fences, some slashed open or bent as if from the struggle of someone’s desperate climb over.

Ouadahi’s fence paintings are powerfully suggestive of the cultural and political significance of boundaries and human migration at a time when border-tightening figures prominently in political discourse in both the United States and Europe.

Born in Morocco in 1959 to Algerian political exiles, Ouadahi studied architecture in Algiers before immigrating to Germany, where he attended Dusseldorf’s world-renowned Kunstakademie.

Since last July, Ouadahi has volunteered as a translator and facilitator with refugees from the Middle East after seeing them in greater numbers across the street from his studio, streaming into a sports hall turned emergency camp.