MEHRAN DANAIE

Landscapes
15 August -5 September, 2014

Assar Art Gallery presents Landscapes, an exhibition of paintings by Mehran Danaie.

For his first solo exhibition with the gallery, the artist exhibits a series of small paintings on watercolor paper rendered in marker pens.

Considering painting as an aesthetic mode of creative expression independent of any social or political context, Danaie exhibits 25 of his small-sized landscapes to his audience for the first time.

Outwardly, each work resembles an untouched earthly paradise the artist has picked as a safe haven to stay away from the bustle of modern city to focus, observe nature and use it as inspiration, while unlike the landscape painters of late 19^th and early 20^th century with such approach, each work is a detailed visualization of imagined scenery, generated in the middle of the hectic capital, Tehran, at the artist’s studio. The exhibited works are neither idealistic landscapes recalling Utopia nor a travel memoir, but Danaie’s narrative realized as a pictorial journey of illusionary places kept for the past three years.

Mehran Danaie was born in 1984 in Tehran where he currently lives and works. He earned his BA degree in painting from the College of Fine Arts, Tehran University in 2008 and soon after began his career as an artist in different realms such as painting, printmaking and photography.