VAHID HAKIM

About Knotting the Air
26 November -24 December, 2021

Assar Art Gallery announces the exhibition of Vahid Hakim’s most recent series titled About Knotting the Air. A continuation of his creative journey and an effort in the direction of his previous artistic experiences and expressions, in these works Vahid Hakim utilizes an alternative tone to expand the connotations and undertones of his practice, this time by creating intertwined and outspread warp and weft patterns that result from laying out dot-like burn marks on the surface of the paper.

This series of work is the outcome of spending four years on a contemplative track, itself the culmination of a path taken about fifteen years ago. The series consists of works which simultaneously show a consonance in style and a diversity in approach and expression, resulting from a conceptual and painterly process that stems from the artist’s creative experience.

Like Hakim’s previous work, the pieces in this series make clear allusions to the climate of the desert margin and elements such as hand-knitting, vaulted domes, and traditional dome-shaped ice-houses. Moreover, the current works feature traces of “squaring the circle”, a tradition which has been a permanent focus of the artist from early in his career.

Looking at how the artist has created framesets, interwoven lines, density, opaqueness and clarity in About Knotting the Air, one can find similarities to “Falling in Order” (Assar Art Gallery, Tehran, 2016), with the recent series doing away with ornamentations altogether. Furthermore, the pitch black that had covered over the underlying layers has been now transformed into lines made up of burnt points which accommodate the blank regions of the paper. Nevertheless, in this series Hakim has created a minimalistic atmosphere whose braided warps and wefts reduce into simple forms, often hinting at his pieces in “Isfahan, Environs” (Emkan Gallery, Tehran, 2016) and “The Light of La” (Assar Art Gallery, Tehran, 2011).

Perhaps Hakim’s intellectual and performative challenge in this series has been to create something out of nothing; to produce an impression on the paper without the use of any material, even paint. As so, he has created his knots and knitting by burning the paper, assembling small dots together, produced by the differing pressures of the hand and developing interwoven and outspread patterns.

Vahid Hakim was born in 1969 in Isfahan, Iran. For nearly three decades, his work has been exhibited in Iran, Europe, China, and the United States, and acquired by esteemed international collections.