Building Bridges No.31 by nassim nasr
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Oil Pastel on Canvas
Dimensions: 120 x 120 cm
Year: 2025
Price: $3000.00 USD
Status: available
In this series titled Building Bridges, I focus on how we spend too much time building walls, and not enough time building bridges. I use the arch as my main element since it is a structure with deep resonance. The arch embodies and symbolizes many things: strength and support, lightness and openness within density, and thresholds into liminal space. In mythology, arches are understood as doorways in time and space through which one passes to enter another kind of time and space, a concept that is deeply consonant with our ministries of both worship and hospitality. In architecture, the arch serves to lift the eye and spirit upwards to a higher plane and ideal.
Why collect this work?
Repeated arches lock together as openings and barriers, making connection and enclosure difficult to separate.
- The artist profile identifies the arch as Nassim Nasr’s recurring image of a threshold before change. Its dense multiplication here complicates that stated meaning: no single crossing appears privileged or complete.
- The photograph shows seven stacked rows of rounded forms, separated by pale outlines and alternating saturated colours. Irregular contours interrupt the grid’s uniformity, while forms cropped at the edges imply a pattern extending beyond the canvas.
- Catalogued as oil pastel on canvas, the work combines coloured fields with emphatic linear borders. This medium can accommodate both drawn contour and broad coverage, supporting the tension between individual units and a continuous surface.
- Nasr describes the Building Bridges series as a response to the tendency to build walls rather than bridges. Encountering this 120-centimetre-square painting tests that distinction: the same repeated unit can register as doorway, arcade, fence, or shared support.
About the Artist
nassim nasr
nassim nasr is an artist on Mondoir Studio. Artistic discipline: painting. Based in dubai, AE.
Nationality: Lebanese
Nassim Nasr is a Lebanese artist based in the UAE, working in oil pigment stick on canvas. His practice centres on a single recurring form, the arch.
