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Sixteen Women Artists of Contemporary Iran
When women unveil
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1.Guizella Varga Sinai Hafez et l'amour éterne
2.Salimeh Motamedi Liberté bleue
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The exhibit, Art au féminin, 16 peintres de l'Iran d'aujourd'hui , featuring sixteen painters from contemporary Iran, provides a unique occasion to discover, here in Montreal, the works of Iranian painters, by offering a feminine glimpse into the role of women in Iranian society through a diversity of styles. This inquisitive gaze bears as much on the place of women artists and their creative freedom surrounding the representation of todays's world as it does on the personal and social stakes which women face in the intimate or public sphere.
The exhibition proposes a brightly coloured journey, made up of works both abstract and figurative. Salimeh Motamedi(2) plays with the borders that divide genre by placing her characters in a balancing act between the figurative and abstract and causes them to disappear under the veil of a shuddering window.
Meanwhile, Erica Ghahremanian decidedly favours the abstract. She chooses arcrylic and the vertical format to create a symbolic column, where black and white confront and overlap each other under the heat of the blazing sun.
Rana Farnood calls to witness the silent battle between two contradictory forces that divide her canvas in two and spray about non-distinct graphic whirls that rise beyond words. Lachaie Farideh(3), proposes a new and personal reading of the flower bouquet, with bright and vivid colours, while deconstructing the floral composition to retain the abstracted forms and colours.
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The four works by Homa Khoshbin(4) allow one to trace the evolution of an artistic process which begins with the figurative, filled with the darkness of a post-war era, where flowers fear to dare the threatening skies and concludes with large abstract full tones of reds or blues that seduce one's gaze and senses. In the figurative mode, Nahid Arian has fun working with the academic language of still-life painting, but in the Iranian manner, by subverting conventions for a moment. Leyla Refahi combines the techniques of painting and photography to present an instant glimpse of urban solitude veiled by constant glares of red, while Farzaneh Babaie sketches in black and white strokes the mechanical ballet of puppet-women, whose awkward and disorderly movements express profound turmoil.
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3.Lashaie Farideh Éruption floral
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4.Homa Khosbin Les fleurs qui poussent
5.Amini Pegah Rouge d'amour
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Solitude and an omnipresent void emanate from these works and seize our attention, nevermore so as in the tragic portrait of two women painted by Mahnaz Chodjaian. The distraught eyes of the faces shed tears of pale colour, inundating the canvas to better absorb the glow of life. More serious still is the group portrait of veiled women painted by Tabatabaie, where the solitude of individualities is lost in the surrounding black of the chadors that draw an anonymous form, strange and threatening, only interrupted by the lonely red dot of a heartbeat. This Hungarian emigrée of Iran, Guizella Varga Sinai(1), through her painting, builds bridges between oriental and western traditions and between the literary and the painterly. By integrating the poems of Hafez into a style which audaciously associates the traditional art of miniature painting with the techniques of modern painting, Guizella Varga Sinai produces a strangely serene riot of colours.
Fascinated by the void, Azadeh Yavari casts her spell with constructed portraits, where the human presence is always implied by the decor, but never truly incorporated by the body. Her work comes to life in constructed places, dominated by a sense of suspended emptiness in time and space. This is a draped and shaded universe which allows spaces to open while at times dissimulating all presence, raising unsettling questions. Closer to the western tradition, Pegah Amini(5) is drawn to modern and naїve art in her use of the female body, whose features and bright colours are vaguely reminiscent of the works of Chagall and of Gauguin. Along or accompagnied, these women seem lost in a persisting solitude, whether they be resting, embracing or stretching.
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The audacity to represent the female body is claimed by Ahoo Hamedi, who opts for the contours and delicate shades of watercolour. An artist of sensuality and intimacy, she dares to show female nudity in a series of works that oscillate between the provocation of a sensuality which exacerbates desire and the provocation of a corporeal freedom of movement, where the body forgets the decorum of aesthetic canons and idealised poses. While playing alternately with the grotesque and with the sensuality she draws out the humanity from these female bodies, appearing everymore provocative by their sheer beauty au naturel. Finally, at the opposite pole from nudity and the private sphere, Chohreh Mehran(6) and Masoumeh Mohtadi present women veiled for necessity in the public space of Teheran. From the young woman dreaming in front of a dress to the young faceless school girls who run and laugh unimpeded despite their veiled stranglehold, the social restraints are shown to impose an image upon women. But Chohreh Mehran demonstrates that beyond the veil, which can be deftly handled by the imagination with color and audacious poses, the interiorised norm which defines the "perfect nose" is even more pernicious, as it acts in the discretion of alcoves. The only visible clue to this accepted violence is a thin piece of white tape placed on the nose, to dissimulate the scars left by this accepted aesthetic norm.
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6.Mehran Chohreh Nez opéré
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