Letters
21 October -9 November, 2011

Assar Art Gallery is pleased to present a new series of paintings by Azadeh Razaghdoost, a personal exploration of the artist’s emotional relationship towards beauty and tragedy.

Azadeh Razaghdoost began work on the Letters series in 2009 taking inspiration from notes and letters by poets, writers and also her own memories of school years and childhood. These works represent an innocent yet sophisticated emotional journey of the artist and portray her very own way of expressing agony towards subjects, realities, stories and memories that have left her feeling painfully poetic.

Being inspired by poets such as Federico Garcia Lorca, Charles Baudelaire and William Blake, some of her painting’s titles such as “My Winey Paper” and “Through Air Where Roses of Black Gunpowder Burst” are taken directly from some of their verses as Razaghdoost believes she identifies with the emotional turmoil some of these people went through while dealing with pain and pleasures of life.

In the Letters series, Razaghdoost has used pencil to write or to leave vague marks on heavily applied oil colours on her canvases producing highly charged pictures that would engage the observers both intellectually and sensually. The marks or words by pencil although not clearly readable along with the paint that has been applied by hands represent an urge for expressing the untold personal secrets and deeper feelings.

Born in 1979, Razaghdoost works and lives in Karaj, Iran. She received a BA in Painting from Tehran’s University of Arts in 2002 and has exhibited extensively at venues around the world. Today her work is part of some important collections and she is considered one of the most active young painters of Iran.