REZA AZIMIAN

False Feelings
30 December -18 January, 2012

Assar Art Gallery is pleased to present False Feelings, an exhibition of new paintings by Reza Azimian.
Strongly influenced by the effects of modern communication tools on social behavior and the environment in which the artist resides, Azimian’s latest works unfolds as the continuation of his well sought after Download series which is a collection of large scale oil paintings that depict various characters and locations focusing on the artist’s personal interest in the negative psychological effects of modern interactions.
Reza Azimian’s paintings explore our changing culture and parallel effects these changes have on our identities and on our social conducts.  What Azimian chooses as his subjects, he finds mainly on the internet combining them with many familiar codes and signs used by most of us daily via the virtual networks to express his ideas about the modern society.  Through these paintings the artist imbues these images as if stripped off from their real characteristics, emphasizing on what he believes is a false and decietful behavioral and emotional codes that most of us today are naturally accustomed to use to define ourselves.  The double identity that chartrooms, social networks and internet in general allows us to have, is a sickly phenomenon Azimian finds not only sad but unhealthy, causing us to lose sensitivity to reality and gradually changing our values in society.
False Feelings presents ten new paintings of various sizes from the Download series that have never been exposed before.  In this collection Azimian tries to balance the abstract and realistic impulses on his canvases through his thickly applied oil paint and colours that very much characterizes his work.
Reza Azimian was born in 1977 in Hamedan, Iran where he still lives and works.  He studies sociology, a subject that became his main focus throughout his career as a self taught painter.  In recent years, his works have been exhibited widely, presented in art fairs worldwide and acquired by some important collectors both inside and outside Iran.