Paradigm Gallery + Studio is pleased to present The event phase, a solo exhibition featuring the multidisciplinary practice of Nazeer Sabree and curated by writer and curator Ginger Rudolph. The Event Phase will be on view in the Paradigm Arts Building (12 N 3rd St, Philadelphia, PA 19106) starting October 3rd until November 23, 2025.

"In his second solo show, The event phase, Sabree approaches his practice as an act of libation — a pouring out of memory, gratitude, grief, and joy for the people and moments that have shaped him. The exhibition unfolds like a constellation of thresholds, each work opening into a chapter of family history, ancestral guidance, and the inner landscapes of Black life. The flow of the show forms a fragile timeline — charting the moments of ceremony, instants of pure ambivalences, and spaces where loss still breathes.

These works unmask his False face series, in which audiences have come to expect Sabree cradling his subjects behind the social and political forces that sway their lives, shift their realities, and dictate how they are seen. In this body of work, however, the veil is lifted. Sabree unveils not only his subjects’ deeper emotions and the intricacies of their relationships, but also himself — including the shadow self, the parts we are taught to keep hidden. Rather than turning away, he moves toward them, confronting the unspoken histories and quiet wounds that live behind the mask.

Material itself becomes a language: oil pastels, with their child-like immediacy, call back to the act of filling in a coloring book, or the first time a crayon traced a loved one’s face. This simplicity is not naïve — it is radical in its tenderness, a return to a time before the world’s weight settled in. Glitter shimmers like the light of God breaking through, evoking visions from scripture: the bush that burns but is not consumed, the pillar of fire that leads through the wilderness, the first light cast over creation. These symbols tie the work to a larger cosmology in which liberation is not only survival, but healing — a kind of exodus from within.

Each portrait becomes an intimate exchange — the curve of a lip, the texture of skin, the gravity of a gaze — but also a vessel for resurrection. “Painting my family, I carry their histories, joys, and traumas into the work, sometimes as heavy as rage, sometimes as tender as love,” Sabree reflects. “The process is both ceremony and battle — guided by something greater than myself — and each piece feels like a temporary resurrection before it leaves the studio.”

No longer mediated by headlines or filtered through reductive narratives about Black lives, these paintings reveal what is felt, remembered, and reconciled beyond public perception. They hold the contradictions of living — grief and delight, struggle and tenderness, endings and beginnings — and offer them to the viewer as both mirror and invitation".

(Text by Ginger Rudolph, curator)