REZA LAVASSANI

Life
30 January -13 March, 2015

Assar Art Gallery proudly presents Life, a papier-mâché installation by Reza Lavassani.

Three years in the making, the show is a lyric narrative of life’s splendor and glory and an emblematic visualization of passage of time. An extension to his previous exhibitions at Assar Art Gallery, the astounding presentation portrays the artist’s perpetual belief in recreation and eternal cycle of life, executed in his signature aesthetic language.

Believing in design as ideology and drawing, painting and sculpting - the three art forms in which he masters - as subcategories to the design thinking and methodology, Lavassani considers himself mainly as a designer whose aesthetic visualization takes two or three dimensional form now and again.

Taking inspiration from ancient Persian poetry and mythology, Reza Lavassani gives physical dimension to his ingenuity through his re-creation and re-presentation of classic notions in a unique contemporary manifestation. He sees life as an ongoing cycle, and thus, his artistic approach, ideological slant and craftsmanship all and all become one and shape his outstanding creations.

The use of recycled paper in his uniquely designed large-scale papier-mâché sculptures is a perfect example of how his ideology affects his methodology and to what extent his sculptures refer to their materiality. During the actual act of making of a sculpture, Lavassani’s initial drawings take on a new life and the virtual borders between physical and intellectual labor are torn down and thinking becomes a form of making and vice versa: a seamless synthesis of theory and practice.

In his latest exhibition, Reza Lavassani showcases a gallery-filling papier-mâché sculpture in the shape of a table, a detailed tablecloth, some tableware and a colossal chandelier of the same material, as resemblances to life. By starting at one end and finishing at the other the viewers walk through the journey of life and witness different phases of life cycle. His ultimate artistry is realized in the Persian literal and mythical motifs he has dexterously made on the table legs as his subjective declaration, exclaiming the transformative potential of aesthetics in which he strongly believes.

Reza Lavassani was born in 1962 in Tehran, Iran, where he currently lives and works. He has held several solo exhibitions in Tehran and has been subject of numerous national and international group exhibitions and art fairs.  He has been the recipient of several awards including UNESCO’s Noma Concourse in 2007 and 1994 and the first prize of Tehran’s 4th Biennial of Sculpture and 6th Biennial of Illustration. His work has been included in a number of publications inside and outside Iran in addition to being part of several important private collections.