Author: Lizzy Vartanian Collier

Lizzy Vartanian Collier aka Gallery Girl is a writer and curator based in London. Her work has been featured in publications including Dazed, Hyperallergic and Vogue Arabia. She was curator of Perpetual Movement during AWAN Festival 2018 and in 2019 had a residency at the Lab at Darat Al Funun in Amman, Jordan. She has also worked with Armenia Art Fair for its inaugural edition and previously worked as an editor at I.B.Tauris Publishers. In 2019 she co-founded Arsheef, Yemen’s first contemporary art gallery. She has given workshops at Manara Culture in Amman, Jordan and Victoria and Albert Museum in London, UK. As of 2020 she is currently in law school, with the ambition of greater understanding the intersection between art and the law.

Afterimage: Dangdai Yishu @ Lisson

August 7, 2019.Reading time 8 minutes.

Here in the West, we all have our own ideas about contemporary art from China. An image of an art scene that has been orientalised, fed to us through exhibitions that pop up from time-to-time, conflated with ideas about a booming Chinese art market, and that conform to a very narrow stereotype about life and […]

Gallery Girl Meets Fatima Ronquillo

July 30, 2019.Reading time 9 minutes.

Fatima Ronquillo’s paintings look like they were painted hundreds of years ago. Classical in style, and full of cherub-faced characters adorned in lace masks, flowers, animals and lovers eyes – a Georgian motif made popular in the late eighteenth century – it is hard to believe that Ronquillo’s paintings are being made in Santa Fe, […]

bahith @ Gazelli Art House

July 24, 2019.Reading time 7 minutes.

In Akka Artwork (Naqsh Collective, 2019), a large-scale piece made of natural stone marble and brass, a number of figures line up to jump off of a tall cliff into a calm sea down below. As they leap from their highly intricate surface, they wave their hands in the air and look down below expectantly, […]

Gray Wielebinski @ SEAGER Gallery

July 17, 2019.Reading time 9 minutes.

A sphinx-scorpion hybrid lies trapped inside a white cube. With its tail pushed against one wall, with two arms struggling to escape from another, its cramped positioning illustrates the animal’s attempts to leave the barren wasteland it has been caged into. Spread out across the floor, it appears like it has accepted its fate, resting […]

Gallery Girl meets Neda Tavallaee

July 10, 2019.Reading time 9 minutes.

“We are taught how to love as women by our mothers and grandmothers…there is beauty in listening to how each woman yearned and tried, succeeded or failed but still did not give up on love, enough to pass on her story.” – Neda Tavallaee Iranian artist Neda Tavallaee is predominantly concerned with women. Working across […]