Shirazeh Houshiary
June 6 - July 27, 2012Via Zenale 3, Milan
Press Release
Shirazeh Houshiary’s work mediates between presence and absence, being and not-being. Utilising various media … painting, sculpture and animation, Houshiary’s work strives to capture the intangible essence that underlies existence.
Her compositions of finely wrought skeins of pencil and pigment, armatures of aluminium, or fleeting digital apparitions, evoke impossible topographies: the microscopic or cosmological. Though elusive and visually confounding, these works are invested with an energy that, while exposing the limits of human perception, register as an intensely physical presence.
Houshiary’s paintings both insist on and deny being read. Beginning with a black or white aquacryl ground, she uses pencil to inscribe layers of text derived from two words – one an affirmation, the other a denial – crushed upon one another until transformed into intricate webs and diaphanous veils, which are then laced with bursts of pigment.
In Right of Spring, a new painting located in the main gallery, these inscriptions snake and swirl around a series of ruptures in the painting’s textual web from which vaporous plumes of vivid blue pigment unfurl so that the surface of the work appears to swell and then recede into infinite space.
Similarly in the painting Deluge, a network of capillary-like pencil marks and flushes of colour fade and intensify like gradations in bruised flesh.
Houshiary’s recent sculpture, while achieving a clear and compelling physical presence, is underpinned by something inherently fugitive: the centripetal or centrifugal forces that cause it to appear constantly poised to dissipate.
The wall-based work Lacuna, made of interweaving ribbons of lacquer coloured steel, exceeds the limits of its materiality by replicating itself in shadows: multiple spiraling forms that are both turbulent and tranquil.
With the sculpture tower White Shadow the interplay between absence and presence is critical. Formed from rotating columns of hollow painted aluminium bricks, each brick acts as both an essential structural building block and a moment of caesura. As the viewer moves around the sculpture, architectural form transmutes into void and back into architectural form.
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Exhibition Images
Shirazeh Houshiary Installation view Lisson Gallery, Milan 2012
Shirazeh Houshiary Installation view Lisson Gallery, Milan 2012
Shirazeh Houshiary White Shadow, 2005 Aluminium bricks and steel cable height 405 cm; ellipse 66 cm x 47 cm
Shirazeh Houshiary White Shadow, 2005 Aluminium bricks and steel cable Detail height 405 cm; ellipse 66 cm x 47 cm
Shirazeh Houshiary White Shadow, 2005 Aluminium bricks and steel cable height 405 cm; ellipse 66 cm x 47 cm
Shirazeh Houshiary White Shadow, 2005 Aluminium bricks and steel cable Detail height 405 cm; ellipse 66 cm x 47 cm
Shirazeh Houshiary White Shadow, 2005 Aluminium bricks and steel cable height 405 cm; ellipse 66 cm x 47 cm
Shirazeh Houshiary Delirium, 2012 Pencil, pigment on black and white aquacryl on canvas and aluminium 120 x 120 cm
Shirazeh Houshiary Right of Spring, 2012 Pencil, pigment and black aquacryl on canvas and aluminium 190 x 190 cm
Shirazeh Houshiary Right of Spring, 2012 Pencil, pigment and black aquacryl on canvas and aluminium Detail 190 x 190 cm
Shirazeh Houshiary Right of Spring, 2012 Pencil, pigment and black aquacryl on canvas and aluminium 190 x 190 cm
Shirazeh Houshiary Deluge, 2012 Pencil, pigment and white aquacryl on canvas and aluminium 120 x 120 cm
Shirazeh Houshiary Deluge, 2012 Pencil, pigment and white aquacryl on canvas and aluminium detail 120 x 120 cm
Shirazeh Houshiary Untitled, 2008 Blue and grey pencil on black aquacryl on canvas 40 x 40 cm
Shirazeh Houshiary Lacuna, 2011 Cast Stainless Steel Height 80, length 220, depth 80 cm
Shirazeh Houshiary Lacuna, 2011 Cast Stainless Steel Detail Height 80, length 220, depth 80 cm