ALIREZA MASOUMI

Through the Car Windows
2 February -23 February, 2018

Assar Art Gallery is pleased to present Through the Car windows, the latest series of paintings by Alireza Massoumi.

In his second solo show with the gallery after eleven years, Alireza Massoumi exhibits his large oil canvases and small rollerball drawings picturing landscapes in motion. His strong signature brush strokes and the vivid colors he uses, perfectly intertwine in his latest body of work to depict the unified world he tends to portray.

Alireza Massoumi is famous for spontaneous materialization of his take on the past and in this exhibition he has extensively shown this with the help of his painterly skills.

In his latest works, the artist materializes some of his imaginary sketches while travelling around the country. Without using any photos as reference and solely relying on his emotional memory, in his large canvases he realizes the scenery he has been surrounded with in various moods and at different times of the day with varied lighting while driving to and from his studio that used to be located in the outskirts of Tehran. His small drawings on paper, too, are the studio interpretations of his travels, depicting his emotions, imagination and take on the places he visited.

It is challenging for Alireza to distinguish between real and visionary sceneries when the landscapes are fast moving, and he cannot clarify the intersection between parts of nature, where mountains end for instance and sky begins. This unified world he has created with blurred contours is in fact Alireza’s current intellectual point of focus and what makes his recent body of work very different from his other series. To him, all parts of nature delicately transform into one another and become one and create an aura he has colorfully envisioned.

Alireza Massoumi was born in Cardiff, UK in 1978 and moved to Iran with his family at the age of one. He dropped out of the Azad University after a semester of studying Mine Engineering to fulfill his artistic needs. Alireza is a self-taught painter with eight solo exhibitions in Tehran and Dubai and has participated in many group exhibitions in Iran and Europe since 1999. He currently lives and works in Tehran.