ANDISHEH AVINI
2014-01-27Andisheh Avini uses the subjective experience of his Iranian heritage as a platform from which to explore more collective notions of memory and the significance of imagery. Avini has reduced the appropriated image of the revolutionary figure to his eyes, and in doing so, uproots the image’s cultural specificity. Mysterious, menacing, and lofty, the series alludes to a child’s impressions of the world around him – gained both through empirical interaction and the mediation of popular culture. In turn, these images inspire the adult recollection of those early impressions.
Handmade in Iran, the panels that Avini uses as the support for these works are made to order, and their geometric designs are a highly recognizable and quotidian feature of Iranian culture. By painting over them, Avini uses the tight patterning and rigid, age-old tradition of these panels as a way to explore the liberated, gestural potential of painting. This visual interaction further suggests the artist’s own relationship to his cultural heritage and personal history, linked as it is to an historical moment whose regulated visual proscriptions are antithetical to the aesthetic possibilities within his life in New York. Sourcing bits and pieces of simple images – the curve of a lock of hair, for instance – Avini reduces them to their essential forms until their origin is diluted and the fluidity of paint is emphasized. In these palimpsestic hybrids, Avini’s overwriting obstructs and complicates the language of the traditional designs, both in a visual and conceptual sense.
Exhibition runs through to February 15th, 2014
Marianne Boesky Gallery
509 West 24th Street
10011
New York
USA
