Daniele Genadry and Fayçal Baghriche in Dubai: Fading Images at Taymour Grahne Projects

Every January in France, someone bites into a slice of galette des rois and finds a tiny porcelain figure — a fève — hidden in the almond cream. The Daniele Genadry and Fayçal Baghriche exhibition at Taymour Grahne Projects in Dubai starts, improbably, from that small object and from a painted waterfall that seems to dissolve as you look at it. The two-person show, on Alserkal Avenue from 17 November to 12 December 2026, is curated by Lucas Morin of Jameel Arts Centre, and it is built around a single, surprisingly rich idea: what happens to an image when it starts to lose resolution.

Two artists, one problem

Both artists live in Paris, but they come to the question from opposite directions. Genadry, a painter, works from the landscape and from photography, and asks how perception fixes — or fails to fix — what we see. Baghriche, a conceptual artist with a long record of working with found and everyday objects, starts from things that are already copies of copies. The gallery frames their meeting as a shared fascination with fading resolution and image degradation. In practice that means paintings that refuse to come into focus, and sculptures that look as though they have been worn smooth by time.

Daniele Genadry: landscape as apparition

Born in Baltimore in 1980 and working between Paris and Beirut, Genadry studied at Dartmouth College and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Her CV includes fellowships at the British School at Rome, Bogliasco, the Camargo Foundation and the Munn Artist Fellowship in Giverny — Monet’s village, which tells you something about the lineage she is in conversation with — and exhibitions at Jameel Arts Centre, the Sursock Museum in Beirut, MUCEM in Marseille and the Bronx Museum, as well as the 13th and 17th Sharjah Biennials.

She works in acrylic and oil, and the surfaces produce what she calls “apparitions”: views that appear and recede rather than settle. The centrepiece here is Trees (Transparent Time), a 2026 triptych some 4.5 metres wide, in which towering trees frame a distant waterfall that recalls nineteenth-century photographs of Yosemite — the images that helped invent the American idea of wilderness. Long horizontal canvases such as Lake Line (Dream V) deny the eye a single focal point, while mountain paintings on the mezzanine stack several moments in time and let grids and folds show how the picture was put together. A polyptych of ten cyanotypes and four graphite drawings on mylar extend the same enquiry into photographic and drawn media. In all, Genadry shows 16 works.

Fayçal Baghriche: a village of flawed copies

Baghriche was born in Skikda, Algeria, in 1972 and trained at the Villa Arson in Nice. He has shown at the Centre Pompidou, the Hammer Museum, and the Gwangju and Dakar biennials, and his work is held by the Centre Pompidou, Zayed National Museum and the Barjeel Art Foundation, among others.

The Village is his first series in ceramics — and, as the gallery is keen to stress, he is not a ceramicist by training. He takes mass-produced fèves, specifically the faulty ones with blurred features and smudged glazes, and enlarges them in porcelain and stoneware to roughly the size of a human face. Scaled up, the defects become the subject: the figures look eroded and ghostly. Seventeen of them are shown, with titles such as La Vierge, Le Chameau Rose, L’Odalisque and Oum Kalssoum — a range that runs from Christian nativity to Orientalist cliché to the great Egyptian singer. Gathered together, they read as a crèche. The paradox the curator draws out is labour: copying something cheap and imperfect by hand demands enormous precision.

How the pairing works

Put side by side, the two bodies of work make each other more precise. Genadry’s paintings show degradation as a condition of seeing — memory and perception blurring a view. Baghriche’s figures show degradation as a condition of reproduction — the losses that pile up when an image of the Virgin or a camel passes through industrial moulds and global trade. Both ask the viewer to look harder at what is not quite there.

The gallery and the season

Taymour Grahne founded his gallery in 2013 in Tribeca, New York, before moving its focus to a 200-square-metre flagship on Alserkal Avenue. Its programme centres on painting-led practices and artists working between the Global South and the West — a description that fits both artists here. The opening on 16 November places the show at the start of Alserkal Art Week, when Dubai’s galleries reset their programmes and international visitors arrive for the season.

Why it matters

• For painters: Genadry offers a masterclass in how to make a contemporary landscape that is about looking, not scenery.
• For collectors: two artists with substantial institutional records, presented with new work, in a tightly curated show.
• For anyone in Dubai during Art Week: a thoughtful counterweight to louder fair-season presentations.

Visiting information

Taymour Grahne Projects, Warehouse 31A, Lane 4, Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz 1, Dubai. 17 November – 12 December 2026; opening reception 16 November, 18:00–21:00. Open Monday–Saturday, 11:00–19:00. Email [email protected]. See our exhibition listing, the official exhibition page, and more shows on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.