Khaled Chamma

Dutton presents Morphosis, a solo exhibition of works on paper by Khaled Chamma. Made with color pencil on paper over the last year, Morphosis embodies an ever-changing meeting of natural and psychological worlds within the confines of a page, exploring ideas that are as autobiographical as they are universal, and creating images that speak to the complexities of life on earth.

Chamma's work embodies his admiration for animals and nature with a need to express his lived experiences of language, immigration, grief, and otherness. Through a building of layers, a containment of gestures, explorations of organic shapes and psychedelic patterns, and attempts at capturing motion, interaction, and elaborate scenery – the works heave and swell with visual information and become lasting embodiments of time and emotion.

Informed by his teenage years living in Syria, Chamma’s art practice engages with processes that mirror the feelings of constraint, pressure and fear felt living under a totalitarian regime. By looking to examples of grace and brutality in nature in his subject matter, he is able to anthropomorphize these feelings and contextualizes the many nuances of human trauma within the natural order of the world.

Khaled Chamma (b. 1992) is a Syrian Australian artist based in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. Using wax-based color pencils, Chamma creates drawings on paper that weave multilayered imagery meeting of natural and psychological worlds. Born to immigrant parents, Chamma lived in Syria for the middle ten of his thirty years. Chamma earnt a Diploma of Visual Art from RMIT in Printmaking (2013); and a Bachelor of Fine Art from RMIT in Expanded Studio Practice (2020). In 2022, his drawing “Summer Daydream” won Brunswick Street Gallery's 'Fifty Squared' art prize. Chamma's first solo exhibition entitled 'Ootheca' opened at Brunswick Street Gallery (2023), and six of his drawings were exhibited in West Space’s 30th anniversary group show alongside artists such as Susan Te Kahurangi King entitled 'Unison' (2023), curated by Sebastian Henry-Jones. This is Chamma's debut solo exhibition in New York.