Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde is proud to present ‘He Who Came and Disappeared’, a new exhibition of work by Tehran painter, art professor and pioneer, Farshid Maleki in a show running between May 12 – June 09, 2011.
An artist with over 30 years professional practice, as well as an illustrious teaching career in Tehran’s art schools, Maleki’s influence on successive waves of contemporary Iranian artists is irrefutable. He has exhibited across Iran and today, remains an inspiration and mentor to countless artists, working successfully worldwide.
Maleki’s teaching style echoes his own approach to art – eschewing cliché and predictability and instead, employing rapid, deceptively simple techniques to capture and articulate the very complex essence of the artist’s soul. The resulting rawness is pure, unadulterated and brutally honest.
Inspired by the characters and situations he encounters in his daily life, Maleki’s works are executed in vivid outbursts, driven by a spontaneous urgency and creative energy. Figures, loosely based on family, friends or acquaintances, are distorted and twisted within tableaux that question and challenge relationships and social dynamics. These echo the artist’s own personal perceptions of his world, yet through his mercurial creative process, Maleki manages to evoke an internal rhythm and structure, in which perspectives and placements assume a key narrative role.
Intrinsic to the structure of a Maleki, artwork, lies the artists’ own personal journey. Gripped by a unrelenting momentum, Maliki approaches his canvases without a clear, defined end in sight. Compositions grow from a starting point, shifting, evolving and repositioning through the rapid execution– in an ever-evolving parade, of warped, expressive figures. Describing his fluid, intense practice, Maleki draws parallels to the ever-shifting circle of friends, family and acquaintances that flit through his own social sphere. ‘People come and go,’ he comments. ‘Now they’re here, now they’re not. In general, I depict the chaos in my own mind’.
Maleki’s radical style is not defined by content but by the ritualistic gesture of drawing itself. The overlapping of hundreds lines and colours of magic markers shape characters in states of perpetual metamorphosis,originating from the artist's own mythology.Vast and plain colored spaces are rudely thwarted by complicated networks and graffiti-like textures that eventually reveals defiant and distorted forms. Through these themes – omnipresent in his work – Maleki’s oeuvre describes a reality whose central preoccupation is of the man’s relationship to the world.
About FARSHID MALEKI
Born in 1943 in Tehran, he graduated in Graphic Design in Azad Faculty of Art, Tehran and then attended the University of Reading in the UK to obtain his MA in painting. Since his return to Iran, Maleki has been a teacher at four different universities in Tehran and Isphahan encouraging the young artists to overcome convention and challenge themselves. Considered a master; he has had some of the most successful young artists under his tutelage. Mostly exhibited in Iran; he has had several exhibitions in the now closed Ghandriz Hall, a gallery that is recognized for having made a mark in the history of the contemporary Iranian art movement. He took part in all seven Tehran Painting Biennales and his works were acquired by the Tehran Museum for Contemporary Art. Famous for his art criticism, he has often contributed articles to several art publications. He recently participated in New-York Thomas Erben Gallery’s exhibition ‘Looped and Layered’ (April 2009).
Private preview: Monday 16 May from 7 PM
