REZA LAVASSANI

Curtain
26 October -23 November, 2018

Assar Art Gallery proudly presents Curtain, the latest body of works by Reza Lavassani.

One of the most renowned visual artists of Iran, Lavassani composed Curtain as five pinhole drawings and one large-scale papier-mache sculpture.

Throughout his artistic career and practice, Lavassani has focused on developing links between past and present. His motifs of the past three decades provide fodder for communication. With Curtain, Lavassani reinstates his master craftsmanship, presenting works that bear his unmistakable poetic signature, his letter to the world.

A believer in design as ideology, Lavassani places drawing, painting and sculpting as subcategories to design thinking and thus considers himself principally as a designer whose aesthetic visualization takes two or three dimensional form now and again.

Fascinated with Persian literature and ghazal in particular, Lavassani speaks an urban poetic language that connects his cultural past to the present. He re-creates the eloquent and emblematic motifs one can find in Persian/Islamic visual and lyrical history, processes and refines them through his ocular and cognitive perspective and minimalizes them in a unique way, giving birth to an artistic progeny. Three years in the making, each design is given a material form, whether a small ornamental decoration on the leg of a papier-mache chair, a silver broche, a small part of a 4-meter long boat or a white pinhole drawing that is somewhere between three and two dimensional.

There is a visual harmony connecting the various elements in Curtain. In structure too, the viewer will find flow, as if Lavassani’s works are connected through an inner geometry, allowing them to appear in the form of a carpet, a piece of architecture, a sculpture, a dish and more.

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