PRESS RELEASE

Back

MOHAMMAD HAMZEH

Crumples IV
26 December -16 January, 2015

 

Assar Art Gallery is pleased to present Crumples IV, the fourth subseries to the acknowledged Crumples series initiated in 2000.

In his second solo show with the gallery, Mohammad Hamzeh exhibits eight of his recent paintings executed in his signature paper crumpling technique.

The artist’s practice of crumpling human portraits or wrinkling them as he used to put it, has taken a conceptual turn in the course of time. It first started as a visual metaphor to express his self-frustration as he began crumpling the large-scale self-portraits he was working on at the time. The series then took on a more playful and humorous tone towards people and their immediate disposition, materialized as a collection of medium to long shot individuals popping up from their painted background. In his third subseries, however, the crumpling technique turned to a more conceptual tool so as to suggest - visually and metaphorically - the self-detachment that occurs under pressures of time and socio-political constraints.

Through the past fourteen years, Mohammad Hamzeh has extensively experimented the physical, aesthetic and rhetorical qualities of his favored crumpling practice: from painting figures proportionately before deforming and distorting their visual image, to the opposite process of painting deformed and distorted figures and folding them back in proportion. Having mastered in the technique, in his present practice, he has adapted eight famous portraits of the Renaissance era, all believed to be symbols of beauty and perfection, and recreated their beauty in his own aesthetic language for the sake of beauty. In his latest collection, he has beautifully and meticulously distorted majestic images to achieve visual perfection in his exclusive contemporary language and thrived to achieve a unique and refined style with an intrinsic character that could only improve in time.

Born in Tehran, Iran in 1963, Mohammad Hamzeh started painting under the supervision of the Iranian Master, Aydin Aghdashloo at the age of twenty. He has been part of various national and international exhibitions ever since his first solo exhibition in Tehran in 1992.