MOJTABA TAJIK

Tan-Ha (Lonely/ Bodies)
8 December -29 December, 2017

Assar Art Gallery presents Tan-Ha (Lonely-Bodies), the latest series of paintings by Mojtaba Tajik.

Two years in the making, the series focuses on solitude and depicts the tough yet amiable moments of seclusion. Moving out of his signature boxes that somehow portrayed enclosed emotional states and social circumstances, Tajik moves on toward a more open and less bordered expression of feelings that still connote a particular individual and the same time social state of being.

In his fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, Tajik undertakes an epic tone in his eight acrylic canvases and gives them a timeless quality with his choice of genderless clothes that seem to be more mythical than contemporary.

Despite making a massive detour in his recent body of work by not entrapping his objects, Tajik still takes on a symbolic language to portray his social and individual concerns. As in his earlier works, the artist chooses an object and displays it theatrically in a staged scenario to insinuate what he has on mind. The clothes he has picked this time along with their hangers, for instance, balanced in front of dull and unpolished walls by a thread, once again portray his everlasting belief in impermanence as the thread could be cut any moment and change the whole setup. In other words, the lighting, the inelegant clothes, the rough walls and Tajik’s compositions as a whole, allegorically imply solitude.

One of Iran’s most renowned hyperrealist painters, Mojtaba Tajik started his professional career as a photographer before being trained by Master Aydin Aghdashlou as a painter. Born in 1966 in Tehran, Iran where he currently lives and works, Tajik has had many solo exhibitions in Iran, USA and Qatar and participated in numerous group exhibitions, biennials and art fairs worldwide.