Hayv Kahraman
dal 26/2/2015 al 3/4/2015
Segnalato da
26/2/2015
Hayv Kahraman
Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Her work grapples with the marginal spaces between Western and Middle Eastern culture, aesthetics and concepts of gender through her personal history as an Iraqi emigre to Europe and ultimately the US.
Hayv Kahraman’s work grapples with the marginal spaces between Western and Middle Eastern culture, aesthetics and concepts of gender through her personal history as an Iraqi émigré to Europe and ultimately the US. Her paintings elegantly recall Japanese style calligraphy, Italian Renaissance painting and illuminated Arab manuscripts, though the subjects are deeply and psychologically brutal. Her work calls back to these Western and Middle Eastern art histories, but her aesthetic, as an immigrant, belongs to neither.
In a recent, New York Times article about her exhibition Extimacy, she says “Having these women violently detaching their limbs, for me, is very reminiscent of the psyche of a refugee, and that sense of detachment you have from your land that you’ve had to leave behind. That’s the idea of the diasporic women, who are fragmented, or cyborgs almost. They’ve had to give up part of themselves.”
Hayv Kahraman immigrated with her family to Sweden at age eleven and started painting by age twelve. She studied art in Italy at the Accademia di arte e design di Firenze in 2005 and studied web design in Sweden in 2006. “While the underlying questions of diaspora and gender are still catalysts in my work, stylistically my work has shifted towards a more abstract translation of patterns... Recently, I've been fascinated with geometry and symmetrical systems of solids and tessellations. I'm attracted to the idea of symmetry as a representation of the sublime in a Kantian sense, and how these systems of patterns can be a reflection of the infinite.” (From an interview with the Huffington Post, 2012)
Kahraman currently lives and works in San Francisco. Her work is included in exhibitions including Echoes: Islamic Art and Contemporary Artists, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; The Jameel Prize 2011 – Shortlist Exhibition, Victoria and Albert Museum, London which traveled to venues including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Cantor Center, Stanford University; Fertile Crescent, Paul Robeson Center for the Arts, Princeton; Newtopia: The State of Human Rights, Kazerne Dossin Museum, Mechelen, Belgium. Her work is included in several public collections including the American Embassy, Baghdad; The Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; MATHAF Museum of Modern Art, Doha; and The Rubell Family Collection, Miami.
Kahraman’s first solo exhibition with Jack Shainman Gallery was Let the Guest be the Master (2013).
Image: Hayv Kahraman, Kawliya.1., 2014, oil on linen, 96 x 48 x 2 inches, HK14.001
Opening: Friday 27 February
Jack Shainman Gallery | 513 West 20th Street
513 West 20th Street
Tue - Sat 10am to 6pm