Kelly Dabbah — ZAZ10TS

Kelly Dabbah: “On the seventh day, God created woman…. and then pizza”

October 1 -31, 2025
ZAZCorner Times Square Billboard, South East Corner of 41st Street and 7th Avenue
PRESENTED “IN BETWEEN” PROGRAMMING

EVE

GOD IS PIZZA

NAIL IT

QUEEN B

Kelly Dabbah’s digital exhibition On the seventh day, God created woman…. and then pizza is a playful yet provocative exploration of beauty, desire, and identity. Known for her maximalist digital collages, Dabbah layers images of friends, paintings, found objects, and fragments of popular culture into compositions that are as chaotic as they are celebratory. Bright colors, textures, and symbols compete for attention, mirroring the relentless pressures and pleasures that shape contemporary femininity.

Infused with humor and 90s nostalgia, the work invites viewers to renegotiate their relationship with oversaturated and mediatized culture. “My work drifts through the beauty standards placed on women, while also celebrating and admiring them. Times Square itself carries a nostalgic connection to the 90s pop culture I love. By reshaping pieces of popular culture into new visual stories, I invite viewers to linger, to question, and to reflect on how beauty, desire, and identity are staged, consumed, and reimagined,” Dabbah explains.

Her work bridges past and present, amplifying the dialogue between her source material and today’s audience. While most videos today are made in 3D, she intentionally preserves the flat 2D animation aesthetic, magnified to monumental scale on the billboards, just like the beauty standards women are constantly confronted with.

Presented on the ZAZ Corner Times Square billboards, the project brings art into the everyday, offering passersby a fleeting moment to smile, escape, or reconsider the images surrounding them. For Dabbah, returning to Times Square, where she first appeared in a group show in 2020, marks a full circle moment: a louder, bolder continuation of her journey as an artist redefining what it means to create, to reflect, and to play with the symbols of womanhood.

About Kelly Dabbah

Kelly Dabbah (b. 1991, Geneva) is a collage artist based between New York and Switzerland. Applying collage across a wide range of objects d’art, from furniture to fashion, she reinterprets and subverts feminine tropes and symbolism to create an emboldened aesthetic. In her digital works, often printed on mirrors, she fuses brightly colored photographs, her own paintings, and found imagery into compositions that are both exuberant and disorienting.

Her works compete for the viewer’s attention through bold contrasts, drawing the eye from polished fingernails to peacock feathers, spandex clad asscheeks, and ice cream cones ripe for the licking. These scores of firsthand source material emerge as natural byproducts of a lust for life that clamors to document every fleeting moment.

Dabbah’s Middle Eastern heritage and deep interest in decorative arts traditions have influenced her maximalist approach to pattern and detail. With a degree in fashion design from Parsons School of Design, she seamlessly moves between art, design, and fashion.

Artist Website: www.kellydabbah.com Instagram: @kellydabbah