SHAHPARI BEHZADI

The Highest
24 January -14 February, 2020

Assar Art Gallery presents the latest series of paintings by Shahpari Behzadi titled The Highest.

Shahpari Behzadi has been an abstract painter for the past twenty years in spite of the major changes she has gone through intentionally.

At the beginning of her career as a painter, she tried to achieve abstraction. Afterwards, she tried to personalize this achievement and the third phase of her work was to attain an Iranian identity, which was realized in her last two series in the past six years.

In her most recent series that began three years ago, she has laid her focus on the abstraction of monuments she has selected, by depicting their ruined surfaces, colors and forms in her painterly language.

What makes Behzadi’s recent works different from her older works is her perception of abstraction, her paintining experience and innovation mixed with some sort of playfulness. Her latest works, thus, are simpler and more comprehensive at the same time and technically much more sophisticated.

To Shahpari Behzadi, the act of painting is very personal and challenging, and socio-political issues have never had any impact on her work. Her approach towards panting, too, is very abstract and she has always looked for a new experience throughout her life as a painter.

In her recent series, she has tried to execute her personal approach towards the abstraction that exists in her selected monuments. In addition to all her former experiences, color and form, too, speak here.

The works in this series are divided into three groups: the small paintings on compressed canvas, the big paintings and the bulging polyptych paintings. In her small works, accident plays an important role but with Behzadi’s full control that guides the accidents in her desired path. In these works, unlike in her past two series where a pre-arranged plan was required, improvisation, destruction and recreation are also included, like what she used to do in her older series. The polyptychs are visual versions of the interiors of the monuments that are painted on canvas in Behzadi’s painterly language.

Shahpari Behzadi was born in 1973 in Tehran where she works and lives. She has had 13 solo exhibitions up to the present time and participated in over 40 group exhibitions worldwide. She has also taken part in many international painting symposiums in Europe since 2001.