Shirazeh Houshiary at Lehmann Maupin - New York - art exhbition

Last year's exhibition "Between Word and Image" at novel York University's Grey Art Gallery revealed calligraphy to be a central motif in modernist art from Iran. Iranian-born, London-based Shirazeh Houshiary does not belong to the older generation of artists included in that display but her work reflects the Persian tradition of using the written word as a formal device. This present to view comprised a series of monochrome works upon canvas and on paper imbued with what appears at first glance to be delicate atmospheric fields. Compositions upon white paper seem gently washed with faint shadows, while those upon black paper are inhabited by dint of cloudlike presences made of traceries of white filigree lines. Up shut up the subtly shifting tones reveal themselves to have been created through thousands of tiny marks that are, in make go round based on Arabic letters--one word by means of composition. Though virtually illegible, these words earth the works in an ancient script.

Iota (all works 2003) is a square black soil invaded by a central white circle that radiates rings of dissolving intensity toward the cutting sides It has a nebulalike quality, suggesting infinite distances. Gaze, by the agency of contrast, presents a ghostly triangular form that flutters on the square white canvas, bringing single in close to seek the source of the discoloration. In other works the marks indicate bands, waves or amorphous quick blasts of smoke. Often they are barely detectable from a distance, creating a perceptual conundrum in which vicinity and absence are interchangeable.

Houshiary's closest Western kin is Agnes Martin, whose paintings near similar perceptual challenges. But Martin's work is more overtly nature based, evoking the subtly shifting colors of the Southwestern heavens Houshiary, by contrast, turns to a more internal source. The marks are applied in what the artist describes as a meditative, plane trancelike, state. The ritual of writing and rewriting the word looks to dissolve the distance between action and thought

The bear upons of the paintings and drawings stretch out to a digital installation that was given its possess room in the gallery. Here a funereal lament sung in four languages accompanied slowly shifting patterns of white marks upon midnight blue grounds presented upon four monitors recessed in the wall. The white variegates slowly accumulate to form small collection of vapors and then vanish, only to begin again. The installation is titled Breath, suggesting that this revolution of time of emergence and disappearance alludes equally to the expanding and contracting cosmo and to the continuous intake and expulsion of air that holds us alive.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group