Barvinskyi Gallery presents "Between Ornament and Structure", a solo show by Farniyaz Zaker (b. 1982 Tehran) from May 17 untill June 20, 2024.
A multidisciplinary artist whose work spans the fields of textile art, sculpture, drawing, print, video and installation, Zaker has long been interested in how architecture, textiles and the body interact to shape our perception of space, boundaries and identity. The same themes reoccur in Zaker's current show at Barvinskyi Gallery, where the focus largely lies on the space-making qualities of textiles.

Works  from Ali Nassir are currently exhibited in the group show "Unreal Realities"at Sevil Dolmaci Dubai. The exhibition will continue until June 1st.

Ali Nassir (b. 1951 Tehran) is presented with his most recent paintings where he creates a harmonious blend of restless memories, chaotic environment and complex issues merged with the intrinsic beauty and joy of life, turning his work into a continuous attempt at expanding this sense of aesthetics. The interplay of form, color, movement and composition in Nassir’s works are meticulously interconnected. Within his paintings, one can encounter urban symbols, elements from nature, or even unexpected juxtapositions of objects that would never coexist in real life. These unconventional combinations permeate the artworks with compelling meanings within the framework of the painting itself.

For more information click here.

This book, a product of Amir Soghrati’s dialogues with Ali Nasir over the past few years, is an effort to record the emotions, feelings, thoughts and worldview of Ali Nassir as one of the influential artists in the contemporary art history of Iran. Writing and publishing oral history books of contemporary art in Iran, away from memoirs and reminiscences, is a new and essential aspect in the field of visual arts and this book has taken a part to that endeavor.

"Tajrobe" magazine in its 22nd edition, overviews Ali Nassir's body of work in an interview with the artist and an overview on his recent exhibition showcased concurrently by O Gallery and Lajevardi Foundation in June 2023.

We live in an era where balance has come to represent a kind of utopia; an expression of the desire to find better circumstances for the broadest spectrum of the population.

Political resistance has been driven towards opposite poles, reducing our nuanced idiosyncrasies, geographical conditions, diverse doctrines, and interests. Multipolar brings together artworks highlighting income inequality and social, political, and ecological emergencies.

Embracing openness, flexibility, and a humanistic conscience has the potential to bring about a more sustainable future where we can reconsider our relationship with the planet and each other, achieving empathy without having to share the same ways of thinking.

Questioning the parameters on which our relationships with other individuals and communities have been founded could prove helpful for living in an uncertain future. Conversation and the ability to reconsider our assumptions will lead us away from linear and hierarchical world views.

Social conflicts such as racism, injustice, extractivist projects, and global warming are connected. Perhaps by first conceiving of ourselves as an endangered species, we can open up the possibility of ending the abusive systems against nature and each other.

Kindness and generosity towards those with opposing views may serve as a powerful method of understanding our contemporary landscape and may provide the opportunity for us to embrace the beauty within the nuances and complexities of the everyday.

– Itzel Vargas Plata, Chief Curator at Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City

For more information click here.

The upcoming exhibition will be on display in two parts in O Gallery and Lajevardi Foundation from June 23 to July 21, 2023. O Gallery will focus on showcasing recent works by the artist while Lajevardi Foundation will showcase the artist’s works created between 1980 and 2020 as well as never before exhibited pieces in Iran. A more comprehensive retrospective, co-curated by Hoda Arbabi and Orkideh Daroodi, was originally set to open in TMOCA in the Fall of 2022 but was canceled due to the artist's and both curators' mutual decision.

Lajevardi Foudation
#32 20 Sepand (Jafar Shahri) St., Villa St., Karimkhan Blvd., Tehran
www.lajevaridfoundation.com

We are pleased to announce that two works from Ashkan Sanei’s “Archives” series is now in the collection of Haus Des Papiers (Berlin’s Paper Museum).
The House of Paper is the world's first museum of its kind dedicated exclusively to contemporary fine paper art.
The museum project was initiated by entrepreneurs Ulrike Vohrer and Annette Berr from FineArt-Print manufacturing company d'mage. The museum is accompanied and supported by d'mage, as well as the two companies Hahnemühle and Canon Germany.
Together they have been committed to increasing public awareness of the material paper in the visual arts for many years.

Farniyaz Zaker’s project "Enclaves" revolves around the themes of exclusion and belonging. It explores how our language, clothes and built environment engender controlled and delimited spaces and communities that can both foster and suppress our physical and mental selves.
Farniyaz Zaker is an Oxford-based, Iranian-born artist and researcher whose practice engages a variety of mediums, including textiles, sculpture/installation, drawing, print and video. Her works have been exhibited at the Sharjah Art Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, Pi Artworks Gallery, Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, the Laing Art Gallery, Contemporary Istanbul Biennale, the Venice Biennale, Artissima Art Fair and O Gallery.

Maryam Mohry is the winner of this year’s Espronceda – Artistic Residency Award, in collaboration with Swab Art Fair.
Espronceda offers artistic residencies for international artists and the opportunity to exhibit in Barcelona. The Center also programs concerts, workshops, curated exhibitions and professional meetings with established international artists to diffuse culture and promote education.
Maryam Mohry was born in 1979 in Tehran where she continues to live and work.
She held her first solo show at O Gallery in 2019, titled “Greenhouse No.1” which consisted of an installation of soft sculptures and a few works on paper. Her second solo exhibition, “Wandering in the Dark” at O Gallery in 2022, showcased a vast collection of works on paper that the artist had been working on for three years.
While addressing environmental concerns, she keeps a sense of playfulness in her drawings and soft sculptures; and by offering notes of cartoonish eeriness in the humanlike expressions of her characters, she keeps the “game” of storytelling connected within all her works.

A work by Ashkan Sanei is featured in “Drawing Wow 3”, an exhibition entirely dedicated to drawing. After two editions in Berlin – Drawing Wow 1 (2019) at BCMA and Drawing Wow 2 (2020) at Kunstsaelen – Drawing Wow 3 will now take place in Vienna. The exhibition is curated by artists Anna Gille, Philip Loersch, Tim Plamper, and art historian Sarah Petersen and runs from September 7, 2022 to October 1, 2022.

Drawing Wow is a non-commercial artistic platform that is concerned with the long-term and sustainable mediation and linking of both contemporary and classical drawing positions. In order to make the great diversity of the medium visible, new artists are invited to each exhibition and one work from their oeuvre is exhibited. In this way, a platform can be created in the long term that provides a far-reaching overview of the international scenery of artists working with drawing.

The second edition of NADA Curated—a new series of online exhibitions highlighting artists and art spaces from NADA’s international community through curated thematic presentations—features 21 artists present by 17 galleries. The exhibition titled Reduction to Satire (Reductio ad Satura), will be curated by Fatoş Üstek, independent curator and writer and will launch in August 2022.

Reduction to Satire (Reductio ad Satura) is a newly coined term for the NADA Curated series. It is a hybrid term, borne out of the juxtaposition between two distinct approaches of engaging with the truth. Reduction to Absurdity (Reductio ad Absurdum) is commonly used in mathematics and logic, famously by Euclid, as a method to prove by contradiction. Reduction to absurdity can be described as a figure of speech that is defined as arguing to prove one’s own position by showing the absurdity of the position of one’s opponent. Satire (lanx satura), on the other hand, is a literary work that ridicules its subject through the use of techniques such as exaggeration, reversal, incongruity, and/or parody in order to make a comment or criticism. Depiction of the notion ‘absurd’ can be traced in art, through movements of realism and existentialism. The use of satire in visual, literary and performing arts transcends cultures going back to Ancient Greece, with a strong trace in literature, theatre and the arts.
By embedding two distinct methods of relating to reality, Reduction to Satire (Reductio ad Satura) intends to expand the space of speech, expression and viewpoints, by catalyzing new ways of seeing, feeling and thinking.

In “Greenhouse No. 2; A False Memory,” a continuation of her Greenhouse series, Maryam Mohry considers greenhouses as a place for experimenting and playing. The space provides an opportunity to experience nurturing and fabricating as well as recounting and partaking in a conversation. Playful ironies and continuous storylines are the main features of Maryam’s works that have always been created in a fluid and unpretentious fashion due to her cheerful approach and simple materials.
In this project, which is presented in the Pasio space of Mohsen Gallery in collaboration with O Gallery, Maryam embodies mountains and flowers of whose existence she is not entirely sure, for she does not know if the memory of picking those flowers from those mountains are real or a construct distorted recollection of her childhood fantasies. By reconstructing nature, as she questions her own mind and reviews her memories, she seems to invite the audience to rethink the mechanism of falsified memories. Have all our childhood memories really happened? How much of our memories are manipulated by our brains? Are the memories that have turned into key events in the formation of our experiences and personality, forgotten and/or rendered insignificant by others?
Instead of burying the uncertainty and confusion and avoiding it, Maryam welcomes it. Thus, a greenhouse, a sanctuary for her, becomes a workshop in which she can bring memories to life and play around with them. Therefore, working with fabric in this workshop is not a mere choice of material; it is, indeed, the subject matter of her work. It is about keeping alive the memory/tradition that has been going on in her family for years, like delicate and complex needlework used in the finishing of the mountains. Much like her watercolors, however, the flowers have a study-like quality, and similar to her memories, they appear mortal and unstable.
Maryam Mohry steps beyond forging memories in her mind, and creates living examples for them as monuments, so as to make them more real for herself, while facilitating their archival. Does fabrication of memories happen unconsciously in human life? How much does the human brain tend to falsify memories? If we had the power to deliberately forget, modify, and alter our memories, would we make them real? And in that case, wouldn’t our individual identity and historical reality be entirely different?

We are delighted to announce that Afshan Daneshvar (b. 1972 Tehran) has been awarded the first prize of “Paper Art Award” for her exceptional works presented by O Gallery at Paper Positions Berlin.⁠
Founded and sponsored by Canon, d’mage, and Hahnemuehle, the Paper Art Award presented for the second time at Paper Positions Berlin 2022, is the most highly endowed paper art award focusing on paper as a material.
All the works on exhibit have been purchased by the paper art museum “Haus des Papiers” in Berlin for their permanent collection.

In recent years, the historical trajectories and global entanglements of Iranian art before the Islamic Revolution have become subject to increasing debate and conversation, resulting, among other things, in a series of high-profile exhibitions. With this in mind, Mohammadreza Mirzaei and Sven Spieker have organized a one-day symposium at the University of California, Santa Barbara that aims to involve emerging scholarships of pre-1979 Iranian art in a discussion about their research. The organizers aim to provide a platform for these scholars to dialogue critically with each other and the invited audience about innovative approaches and methodologies for the study of Iranian art during the period in question.
The event will take place on May 16 and the registration is open to everyone: https://bit.ly/NATIA

And they are pieces of a long poem that, when put together, embrace you and me and invite us to a heartfelt dialogue by redefining space and matter.
Slowly, majestically and steadily.

Ashkan Sanei
Autumn 2022

Argo Factory, No. 6, Behdasht St., Taghavi St., Ferdowsi Ave.

"Oil: Height of Depth", a collection of works by Mohammad Hassanzadeh published by Pejman Foundation.
The main idea behind "Oil: Height of Depth" project is rooted in the confrontations and transformations in Iran’s southwest after the discovery of oil: historic/geographic configurations that have reminded within human and natural environments that forcefully resisted change, and where traces of this residence appear in different areas like unhealed wounds.

This book was published by Pejman Foundation on the occasion of the "Oil: Height of Depth" Exhibition from "In the Midst" vol.1 project at Argo Factory in May 2021.

Shideh Tami published in the book “Reflections: contemporary art of the Middle East and North Africa” by the British Museum Press.
The book brings together for the first time an extraordinary collection of works on paper in the British Museum, accompanied by the exhibition of the same title, curated by Venetia Porter held at the museum February - August 2021.

"Sanei’s works have been selected by Tehran’s O Gallery for the online exhibition, which will run until May 30.

...

Sanei’s aesthetics is based on destruction and repetition. When it comes to working, however, he swings between creation and destruction as a pendulum, the organizers of the art fair said in a statement about Sanei’s artworks."

Click here to visit the website.

"Bahman Mohassess (1931–2010) is from the generation of Iranian artists who travelled to Italy in the 1950s to study at Italian academies. Mohassess spent time in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, and after returning to Iran in the 1960s, he played a prominent role in the new Iranian art scene. Although he was not Marino Marini’s pupil, Mohassess’s practice demonstrates a special relationship with Marini’s art. In this essay, Mohassess’s artistic strategies are examined in the context of Iranian art in the 1960s and in terms of Marino Marini’s practice. Marini’s dialectical approach creates a route for Mohassess to problematize the descriptive qualities of figurative painting, which results in the confrontation of Mohassess with currents of abstract painting in Iran and their socio-political implications."

To read the full article click here.

"Painting outdoors, especially in the city, confronts the artist with many different challenges; the most important of which is the increase in the number of variables; such as the change in light and shadow, and the movement of vehicles and people. Transforming the great and crowded atmosphere of the city into a two-dimensional surface is yet another matter that the artist must solve in a short amount of time. In addition to these visual dilemmas, external nuisances must also be taken into consideration. Not every artist leaves his/her studio to hit the streets and paint outdoors; not just because of the comfort and quiet of one’s studio, but mainly because of the time and focus it requires to finish the work. Painting on the streets is exciting and fascinating; nevertheless, if an artist is not able to overcome the mentioned issues and transform them into his/her style of painting, s/he has ultimately failed."

Alireza Rezaei Aghdam, "Tehran Demands its Own Painter", Herfeh: Honarmand Issue 77, Winter of 2021

To read the full article click here.