“Nicolas Moufarrege: Recognize My Sign”

Nicholas Moufarrege (1947-1985) was born in Egypt to a Lebanese family, and lived in Beirut and Paris before coming to New York in 1981, where he died from AIDS four years later. In the interim, he plunged himself into the city’s unruly East Village club and gallery scene, which arguably represented a last wild and untamed hurrah for an art world that would soon become an adjunct of global finance. Moufarrege’s work certainly fit the tenor of the period with its surreal blend of appropriated imagery exquisitely embroidered onto needlepoint canvas. The results were both decidedly weird and stunningly beautiful as his considerable sewing skills yielded tapestried mash-ups of epigrams in Arabic, art-historical homages (to Picasso and Lichtenstein in particular) and pop-cultural references. Underappreciated in his time, Moufarrege is finally receiving institutional acknowledgement in this survey of his kitschy, energetic output.