Bavan Gallery is pleased to announce its participation at Kiaf Seoul 2024 presenting works by Nima Zaare Nahandi, Minoo Yalsohrabi, and Sale Sharifi.
Individual works
Installation view
* Press
At the 22nd edition of KIAF Seoul, Tehran-based Bavan Gallery presents fresh works by three young Iranian artists: Salé Sharifi (b. 1989, Tehran, Iran), Minoo Yalsohrabi (b. 1992, Tabriz, Iran), and Nima Zaare Nahandi (b. 1983, Tehran, Iran).
Salé Sharifi’s work consistently feature lush paradises imbued with layers of social and polit¬ical commentary. Through his paintings, Sharifi explores gardens as metaphors for a culture that has been both fetishized and left in ruins. The gardens he depicts appear stained, evoking distant memories or illusions of serenity. These paintings act as a reflection of a society that has drifted away from its historic roots, only retaining fragments of its former glory. Political and social history, literature, and commemoration are the original themes of his works up to the present day. His paintings’ expressiveness could be seen through a gentle navigation of his works. Drawing from Persian gardens, his paintings have evolved from precise depictions of flowers, plants and fountains into abstract, almost three-dimensional perspectives, as if be¬hind translucent glass. The airbrushed gardens he depicts index real places tinged with nos¬talgia, like a fading remembrance. As these images recede from vision, Sharifi adds thick curly marks to the surface of his paintings to remind the viewer that art is illusion and artifice.
Minoo Yalsohrabi’s work explores the configurations and relationships between food and ob-jects within the context of meal preparation and the kitchen, obsessively yet playfully studying motion, cause and effect, bodies, human intervention and light. In her “Paintings for the Kitch¬en” and “Unnumbered Pages from a Lost Recipe Book” Minoo Yalsohrabi explores the configu-rations
Salé Sharifi’s work consistently feature lush paradises imbued with layers of social and polit¬ical commentary. Through his paintings, Sharifi explores gardens as metaphors for a culture that has been both fetishized and left in ruins. The gardens he depicts appear stained, evoking distant memories or illusions of serenity. These paintings act as a reflection of a society that has drifted away from its historic roots, only retaining fragments of its former glory. Political and social history, literature, and commemoration are the original themes of his works up to the present day. His paintings’ expressiveness could be seen through a gentle navigation of his works. Drawing from Persian gardens, his paintings have evolved from precise depictions of flowers, plants and fountains into abstract, almost three-dimensional perspectives, as if be¬hind translucent glass. The airbrushed gardens he depicts index real places tinged with nos¬talgia, like a fading remembrance. As these images recede from vision, Sharifi adds thick curly marks to the surface of his paintings to remind the viewer that art is illusion and artifice.
Minoo Yalsohrabi’s work explores the configurations and relationships between food and ob-jects within the context of meal preparation and the kitchen, obsessively yet playfully studying motion, cause and effect, bodies, human intervention and light. In her “Paintings for the Kitch¬en” and “Unnumbered Pages from a Lost Recipe Book” Minoo Yalsohrabi explores the configu-rations
and relationships between food and objects within the context of meal preparation and the kitchen, obsessively yet playfully studying motion, cause and effect, bodies, human inter¬vention and light. Her drawings and paintings create among themselves a relationship that seems to play with the idea of agency and materiality, with “Unnumbered Pages from a Lost Recipe Book” working like a reference of the culinary arts and practices that “Paintings for the Kitchen” seem to try to adhere to. The drawings work like illustrated instruction manuals taken out of a book, and their technique and material emphasize this idea: the pages look torn from a larger collection of papers.
Nima Zaare Nahandi’s recent series of works, “Spandrelsbotaniques”, imagines the non-func¬tional use of biological pigments by plants, irrespective of the essential role they play in plant’s survival. In these paintings, the accidental formations that result from this use of pigments by plants is explored. These visual formations can be assimilated to human cultural products. This project is inspired by the notion of “Spandrel”, proposed by the biologist Ste¬phen Jay Gould during his visit at the San Marco Cathedral in Venice. By definition, a spandrel is the architectural triangular space formed by the conjunction of arches and columns in a structure. The spandrel has no function in the architectural design and is simply a byproduct of the other essential components. In analogy with spandrels as accidental phenomena in archi¬tecture, these works elaborate the idea of spandrels in botany —the use of pigments by plants in order to attract organisms for reproductive purposes is a biological evolutionary adaptation. A botanical spandrel would be an accidental formation composed of pigments.
Nima Zaare Nahandi’s recent series of works, “Spandrelsbotaniques”, imagines the non-func¬tional use of biological pigments by plants, irrespective of the essential role they play in plant’s survival. In these paintings, the accidental formations that result from this use of pigments by plants is explored. These visual formations can be assimilated to human cultural products. This project is inspired by the notion of “Spandrel”, proposed by the biologist Ste¬phen Jay Gould during his visit at the San Marco Cathedral in Venice. By definition, a spandrel is the architectural triangular space formed by the conjunction of arches and columns in a structure. The spandrel has no function in the architectural design and is simply a byproduct of the other essential components. In analogy with spandrels as accidental phenomena in archi¬tecture, these works elaborate the idea of spandrels in botany —the use of pigments by plants in order to attract organisms for reproductive purposes is a biological evolutionary adaptation. A botanical spandrel would be an accidental formation composed of pigments.
