Concerning our vision in promoting emerging young artists from Iran, in its 1st participation in Volta art fair, Bavan gallery is pleased to present three Iranian artists who have worked consistently in creating their own discourses regarding their propensities to form and shape, together with their attitudes in social and ontological terms. Our curatorial team aim to create an eclectic context by combining three individual approaches in reflecting matters of Iranian life and current situations. Therefore, we believe that our booth is an abstract representation of subjects that are routine challenges of Iranian individuals such as politics, hybrid culture, gender, immigration, and cultural gaps. Our main concept is to make a dynamic contexts that conveys diverse
Our representing artists in Volta art fair will be: Elham Etemadi, Payam Qelichy, and Keiman Mahabadi.
Elham Etemadi is an immigrant artist who lives and works in France. In her paintings, Elham looks for forms and figures to explore the abilities of painting in reflecting what she captures in her daily concerns. In her expressionist figurative paintings she tries to create a vast and expanded language which is not verbal but visual and is based on human feelings and attentions. Her works are combinations of or her different visions and sides of her character; as a mother, a female immigrant, a wife, and an artist. She tries to express her experiences in a visual language that may communicate with as much viewers as possible, from different backgrounds, cultures, nationalities, and genders.
Payam Qelichy is a young artist with a unique and fantastic style. His pencil on paper works, portray his notions upon the Iranian society and the contemporary world. Qelichy is a young artist from one of the small industrial cities of Iran. He moved to the capital to study painting at Tehran University of Art. Since then, he was inspired by various artists from Hieronymus Bosch to David Lynch and other artists whose works include worlds of fantasy and surrealistic relationships among human beings and other creatures. The fictional world that he creates is a transformation of the physical reality that he observes. Qelichy’s drawings are personal reactions to what happens in the world and the society surrounding him. Every element in his work is an imaginary visual translation of the real world. In other words, his work is a black and white phenomenal reflection of life.
Keiman Mahabadi creates his works by collecting images and reproducing them. Interested in social media and how innumerable images are presented in the media, he gets the ideas for his paintings and drawings from the image data he encounters daily. By separating the images from their context and background, Keiman provides a new context for looking at and interpreting the work, this time it is the experience, geography, concerns, and interests of the viewer that give meaning to the image. This playful act of deletion and alteration allows the artist to have a personal and social exploration. The materials Keiman uses for his art are ink and paper, which have historically had a close association with the media and the communication of the ideas to the public.