LONDON.- Green Cardamom presents Faiza Butt, Parental Guidence Suggested, on view 24 January - 1 March, 2008. In her first UK solo exhibition, artist Faiza Butt displays a new departure in her work, and one that explores the changing identity of her growing and maturing children.

Faiza Butt is known for her fusing of Asian and European cultures, merging celebrity photographs, violent stories from Western media and figures from her daily life in her work. Her visual (and cultural) juxtapositions pervert and challenge the viewer’s original perceptions.

In Parental Guidance Suggested Butt will exhibit both small and large scale works. Including an image of ex-New York mayor and US Republican presidential nominee, Rudolph Giuliani with mushroom clouds for eyes, two bearded men locked in a passionate kiss, and a man pointing a revolver at his own head, the three small paintings refer collectively to the psychological landscape of the so-called ‘war-on-terror’.

Whilst visually connected to these depictions of violence, the large-scale works mark significant developments in Butt’s thought, the most dramatic being the identity of their main protagonists: her own children depicted against a toile de jouy-like decorative pattern.

Most commonly associated with curtains and upholstery, toile patterns typically depict pastoral and nostalgic scenes of picnicking couples. Those of Faiza Butt show scenes of random violence: recognisable images of Palestinian children throwing stones or wounded men and mushroom clouds. All scenes are of cruelty beautifully rendered.

Channelling her gaze domestically, Butt examines how her questioning of identity has been picked up unwittingly by the next generation as they absorb their surrounding world: her children serve as metaphors for universal concerns. In Toile de Jouy an angelic portrait of her son -his eyes covered by a daisy - stares at the viewer from a bed of Butt’s malignant toile patterns. The boy seems ignorant of what surrounds him, or perhaps, it has become like wallpaper.