Adi Atassi
Faces Hidden Behind Masks
Exhibition: June 22, 2025 – August 31, 2025
Vernissage: Saturday, June 21, 7:00 PM
Venue: Fuchsthallergasse 10, 1090 Vienna
Faces is a visual meditation on the fleeting, unspoken language of human expression. In this intimate series, Adi Atassi explores the raw beauty hidden beneath our everyday masks the quiet, ephemeral moments that reveal who we truly are.
"Expressions of the human face have always fascinated me," the artist writes. "Those fleeting emotions hidden behind the masks we all wear, the ones we often try to conceal. I find beauty in capturing these intimate, unguarded moments, bringing them to life with quick, delicate touches of watercolors or Acrylic or mixed media. Through this approach, I strive to convey the essence of 'light-speed expressions,' those transient glimpses of truth that define us.”
Using fluid, gestural techniques and a sensitivity to the immediacy of emotion, each portrait captures a moment suspended in time. Some faces are vulnerable, others defiant or contemplative but all pulse with authenticity.
Faces invites the viewer to look closer, to move beyond surface impressions, and to rediscover the power of human connection. One expression at a time.
- Adi Atassi
Statement by the Gallery: “We are thrilled to present Adi Atassi’s debut exhibition in Vienna at smart fox” says Ralph Overbeck, founder of the gallery smart fox. “Atassi’s work embodies a rare balance between poetry and resilience — a dialogue between memory, displacement, and the enduring human spirit. His practice resonates deeply with our vision of art as a bridge between cultures and as a space for reflection and renewal.”
Visual Artist | Adi Atassi
Adi Atassi was born in Homs, Syria in 1962. Growing up in beautiful landscapes, where the colors of nature alternate dramatically under the glaring light and where history and religion coexist, it was natural for his love of art to surface. At the age of 18, he entered the University of Damascus, where he studied Fine Arts. Like a sea gull flying to different lands building its nests, Adi’s fate brought him to Cyprus, which has provided him with his new home since 1987. His status as a foreigner, has given him the loneliness an artist needs, but at the same time, the familiarity of the climate and the history of place, has given him the love and warmth necessary for his creativity to thrive. He has held a variety of exhibitions in the annual show of the Space Studios in Nicosia, in the Open Studios within the walls of Nicosia and in various exhibitions hosted by the Cyprus Chamber of Fine Arts, and he has participated in many group shows in Hungary, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Romania, Germany, and Spain. In 2006, he won first prize in the art-competition for the design and creation of a work of art for the new Supreme Court building in Nicosia. Adi Atassi finds inspiration in love and “the inner world of the multidimensional being. Beautiful poem, film, music, and all my personal experience that kept inside me different impressions about the colourful meaning of life.” That being said, he is always seeking ways to express the lines between the visible and the invisible and bring forward what the heart feels. As a multidimensional being, as creator, as an accumulator of experiences, I can say that I am an artist. I'm interested in chaos, accidents and the harmony and beauty found within. In my work I provoke the accident to later, during the creative process, embrace it looking for reconciliation and homeostasis. My approach as when creating is a construct-demolish-repair process; during this struggle I find a brute yet honest identity of my subjects. Our perception of the world and ourselves is grounded on explicit or implicit agreements in society. I'm instigating this conventionalism and exposing the viewer to a visceral discourse concerned with our own bodily integrity and mortality.
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Adi Atassi