SHAHPARI BEHZADI

Celestial
27 January -17 February, 2017

Assar Art Gallery presents Celestial, the recent works by Shahpari Behzadi. In her fifth solo show with the gallery, the artist exhibits 9 acrylic pieces from the third series of her dot-works.

The dot-works started in 2012 when the artist began portraying three-dimensional every-day objects of past and present in the center of her abstract textured backgrounds shaping her first ornamental-abstract compositions.

The second phase of the same series came to life 2 years later: an abstract representation of domes and ceilings in spiral forms. Now five years after the conception of the whole idea, her canvases have developed into more detailed and sophisticated paintings of particular ceilings of Persian mosques and old buildings.

Behzadi’s take on the Persian abstraction that is inseparable from ornamentation is what gives her recent series a novel quality. Always being an abstract painter throughout her 17 years of career as an artist, Shahpari Behzadi has spoken in an abstract-representational tone for the first time. Focusing on the composition of the Persian/Islamic ornamentation of the ceilings, she has recreated the forms in a minimal yet patterned arrangement. Her palette, too, is an invented one giving her compositions a contemporary nature.

Unlike her routine path of creating abstract works, which is somehow based on improvisation, her latest works required very detailed pre-structured foundation for which she went through days and months of Zen practice. The result is a repetitive geometric abstraction in shiny, sometimes glossy and generally vibrant and intense colors.

Shahpari Behzadi was born in 1973 in Tehran, Iran where she currently lives and works. She received her BA in Graphic Designs from Azad University in Tehran and began her artistic career after her graduation. She has held 12 solo exhibitions in Iran and Europe and participated in over 40 group exhibitions worldwide. She has also been part of several international symposiums in France, Hungary and Slovakia since 2001.