ART GALLERY

MEKIC Art Gallery is proud to be the main venue to exhibit the artists who are from South West Asia and live in four corners of the world. Come and experience the richness of the art, in a cultural and friendly atmosphere, that is created in this region.

Our centre provides the best environment for the artists and the art lovers to freely appreciate and discuss art and participate in cultural exchange.

Nebulous Rings
Exhibition by Khosro Berahmandi (current)

Opening: Friday, May 7, 2010, 7 pm to 10pm
Exhibition runs until August 15, 2010

The idea of painting inspires the friendship between the hands and the infinite airs across a few tools, predicting the destiny. My hands chase the ripped colors, and the wood deciphers itself by the madness of the golden lines which want to be the origin of
the destiny .The hidden caves echo within the nebulous rings of our depth. Suddenly you become the irrigated memory, I, the extension of the forgottens.

This exhibition is the memory of my eyes.
                                                                                        Khosro Berahmandi
                                                                                          

Khosro Berahmandi, the prolific and inspiring artist, returns to the MEKIC gallery with a series of his more recent works entitled Nebulous Rings. From May 7 to June 27, 2010, within the framework of the 15th edition of the Festival Asia Access, he invites the Montréal public to plunge back into his universe of infinite detail from which emerges a personal, extraordinary and captivating mythology.

In this exhibition, Khosro Berahmandi continues his artistic exploration in order to trigger in the observer a questioning of the usual modes of perception as well as a search for meaning. Widening here the horizons of his creativity by recent research carried out at the New Yourk's Metropolitan Museum of Art on two different periods in the Iranian Miniature Painting illustrating Abul Qasim Ferdusi's Shahnameh: The Book off Kings, the Ilkhaniad period (1206-1353), Shah Tahmasp Safavid period (1501-1722), Khosro engages even more his creativity towards a bewitching onirisme of strange creatures which, with an infallible constancy, challenge the onlooker.

To this new series of paintings, Khosro Berahmandi adds two additional projects likely to extend his dialogue with the spectator. The first, Telluric Kiss, is a short art film created in collaboration with Jenn Doan (choreographer and dancer) and Shahin Parhami (filmmaker). The video excerpt to be presented constitutes the starting point for a dance project of a greater scale which takes its inspiration within the most recent works of the artist.

The second project is a new art book including splendid photographs of approximately thirty paintings of Khosro Berahmadi whose forms and colors are enriched by an inspiring text written by the poet and writer Bahman Sadighi. Entitled Oblivion and silence, the book, published by the publisher Ketabe Iran Canada, will be launched during the opening. Thus, as a whole, the artist presents to us here the fruits of his original reflection and his unclassified work carried out throughout the last year with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which, recognizing the value of his artistic work awarded him a creative research grant for the year 2009.

Born in Tehran, Khoshro Berahmandi entered the world of art due to a political situation in Iran that forced him to leave the country. In the first lonely years of exile, he found comfort in painting and soon this interest turned into a vocation. After studying Fine Arts with Paterson Ewen, a Canadian painter who encouraged him to pursue painting, Khosro continued his academic formation at Concordia University in Montreal and at the University of Paris VIII. Since 1990, he contributes to the cultural life of Montreal’s metropolitan city with his exhibitions and art courses as well as with his involvement with Festival Accès Asie.

Khosro has participated in more than twenty exhibitions in Europe, the United States and Canada. In Montreal, his works were exhibited numerous times and the most recent shows Argile Etincelante (MEKIC, Art Gallery 2004) and Re-emerge (MEKIC, Art Gallery, 2009) were great successes among the art lovers who appreciate the originality of his work. He has also collaborated with Iranian poets such as Yadola Royai, Hossein Sharang and Bahman Sadighi, accompanying his art with their poems. The most recent of these collaborations Le même à l’écart was published in March 2009.

At present, the artist is working on his two new book projects. The first, which gathers together seven Montrealer poets around his works, will be published in the autumn of 2010 by Éditions du Noroît under the artistic direction of Paul Bélanger. The second, which also finds its inspiration in the art of Khosro Berahmandi, is dedicated to children, written in English by Kyra Shaughessy and translated into French by Caroline Tabah, and will be published by the MEKIC in the spring of 2011.

The MEKIC art gallery is proud to be able to introduce within its walls Khosro Berahmandi and his paintings that are rich in quality, whose intriguing magic sway sometimes towards lightness or amazement, sometimes towards darkness or extreme brittleness, making them interesting both for the expert as well as the amateur.
                           

          Access the archives