EXHIBITION // ALI CHERRI - LAST WATCH BEFORE DAWN // ALMINE RECH // NEW YORK

© Almine Rech - Ali Cherri - Last watch before dawn

Ali Cherri - Last watch before dawn
From Jan. 16 to Feb. 28, 2026

Almine Rech Upper East Side
39 East 78th Street, Floor 2
New York, NY 10075

www.alminerech.com

Almine Rech New York - Tribeca is pleased to announce Last Watch before Dawn, Ali Cherri's first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from January 16 to February 28, 2026.

I am obsessed with Ali Cherri's watercolors. More recently, the artist has described his practice as having "two main branches": sculptural objects and moving-image works. Yet I would gently quibble and propose that—intentional or not—his intimate watercolors, which emerged during the COVID lockdown, constitute a third and crucial branch. Whether understood as studies or private reflection, they serve as an essential entry point into the broader cosmology of Cherri's concerns: death, violence, occupation, imperialism, and the objects and artifacts through which these histories are sedimented, mediated and retold.

Rendered with controlled yet fluid brushwork, Cherri's watercolors exude a kind of effortless realism. They are startling in their quietude, seductive in their beauty and deeply in conversation with his broader practice. In the series “Dead Inside” (2021-ongoing), for instance, deceased fauna—foxes, fish, birds—alongside wrecked automobiles summon echoes of Andy Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series (1962-67). In “We Grow Thorns So Flowers Would Bloom” (2023), depictions of prickly-pear cacti, rendered with a scientific precision reminiscent of Hilma af Klint’s botanical works, appear at once diagrammatic and radiant. Encountering them, I was gobsmacked by their disarming elegance and deceptive simplicity. Again, I am utterly obsessed.

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- Terence Trouillot, senior editor of Frieze