Although this show just came down at Mendes Wood DM in São Paulo, we wanted to show one of the standout shows of the summer in Ebecho Muslimova's Rumors. The show had a brilliant use of space, with spacious murals and paintings intertwined throughout the show. The show was concurrently shown with Muslimova's Whispers in Zurich.
Rumors and Whispers is a two-part presentation of Ebecho Muslimova’s recent series of paintings across Mendes Wood DM’s São Paulo gallery and Bernheim Gallery in Zürich. A transatlantic game of telephone, the exhibition first opens in Brazil with Muslimova’s Rumors suite, followed two weeks later by Whispers in Switzerland, each painting a response to one at the previous opening. Like the children’s game, telephone, where people whisper a word or phrase across a group in a successive chain, often to discover comical misunderstandings at the end, this body of work tracks the shifting persona of Muslimova’s signature character Fatebe. An abundantly curious and unabashedly liberated personality, Fatebe appears across all of the paintings in different forms, mischievously bursting into some frames and, in some instances, physically embodying a portal between them, translating or responding to the joke of a previous painting. From a stage to the boudoir, a park to a gallery, a New York skyline to an imagined landscape, these seemingly disparate spaces are the playground for Fatebe to explore the interplay between psyche and environment and reflect on the art-making process.