ART-PREVIEW:Shirazeh Houshiary-A Thousand Folds

Shirazeh Houshiary makes painting, sculpture, and animation that seek to challenge viewers’ perceptions of time, space, and materiality. Her works often engage opposing ideas and states of being, including transparency and opacity, sound and silence, energy and inertia, and light and darkness. Houshiary’s painting technique involves the successive layering of pigment and line, a laborious process that often takes several months to complete.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive

Works by Shirazeh Houshiary  are on show in her solo exhibition “A Thousand Folds”, from a distance, her paintings are reminiscent of a cosmos or the universe, but as the viewer draws closer the meticulousness, detail, and hidden Arabic letters that make up her amorphous forms begin to unfold. Contradiction and paradox are at the core of her work, and the wide universe within her field of inquiry is often met with complexity. The Arabic words embedded in her compositions are a juxtaposition of the opposing phrases “I am” and “I am not,” oscillating freely between focused and unfocused states, where the meaning of our existence becomes literally superfluous and lost in her imagined cosmos. Taking its cue from philosopher Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage  the artist attempted to look into the mirror to grasp the image of herself. As she failed to see the image, she drew closer to the mirror where her breath left a residue. When she stepped back, it evaporated—a metaphor for the ephemerality of life. Water is not only an important medium in the making of Houshiary’s paintings, it also speaks to one of the elements that is characteristic of our planet in the universe. Houshiary’s painting technique, which is unique to the artist, involves the successive layering of water, pigment, and line drawing, an intense method that often takes several months to complete. Through this process, the artist creates a platform for water to express itself, movement is organic and free without being controlled by the artist’s hand. Nature takes precedence to make way for what Houshiary refers to as a collaboration with water. Houshiary takes a similarly methodical approach to her dynamic sculptures such as “Aura” and “Twilight” (2019), in which she constructs a tower out of Murano glass in an open form that moves in space and that, layer by layer, seems to emerge from the floor. Each vertical plane of bricks echoes the original shape at its footprint, in this case a seedpod, incrementally rotated to the maximum degree the form will allow before the resulting helix shape becomes unstable. Also featured in the show are wall hung sculptures that challenge both pictorial and sculptural spaces to utilize the wall as a stage: lines curve, loop, and weave, expanding the field of vision to the surrounding gallery space. These seemingly simple twisted hung or floor-based constructions challenge our perception of time and space, to manifest the rhythm that swings between limit and infinity. Formal elements of Renaissance painting can be found in Houshiary’s work in her composition, rhythm, structure, and depiction of light. This is particularly evident in her new digital animation “A Cup and a Rose” (2019) inspired by the 17th century Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán’s still-life painting “A Cup of Water and a Rose” (1630) and set to a musical score by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt titled “Cantus in Memoriam”. The exhibition exemplifies the breadth of her practice to date. The works in the exhibition visualize her ability to engulf the depth of the universe in a ritualistic process using water and layering to create multiple dimensions to the surfaces of her paintings or sculptures. As the title of the show suggests, these works display the many folds of the artist’s practice and the thousand dimensions embedded within her work.

Photo: Shirazeh Houshiary, Duet, 2019, Pigment and pencil, on black aquacryl on canvas and aluminium, 47.24 x 47.24 inches / 120 x 120 cm, © Shirazeh Houshiary, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 501 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 8/4-28/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com