“Blazing Grace” is a new exhibition at East Central gallery in London featuring collaborative works by Iranian artists Shoja
Azari and Shahram Karimi.
Featuring a revolutionary artistic approach which mixes painting and video the show includes five artworks from their “Oil Series” which surround visitors to the gallery, re-creating a cinematic experience through the canvases’ glow of mesmerising colours. Depicting the first Gulf War the work includes scenes of deserts aflame, with fires scorching the skies, smoke bellowing in the wind, a soldier disappearing into misty horizons and tanks reining over ashen land. Also included in the piece is recontextualized images from Werner Herzog’s film “Lessons of Darkness”, with scenes slowed, edited and reframed by Azari, projected as brief looping videos onto Karimi’s hyperrealist paintings which are literally brought to life.
Also on show at the gallery is the stunning video projection “Coffee House Painting”, another creative collaboration between Azari and Karimi. Rich in political and historical references, and equally critical of global politics, the work is inspired by the traditional Persian coffee house paintings that were popular in early 20th Century Iran and which spoke of heroes and villains from Persia’s epic history of myth and legend, dotted throughout with scenes of real soldiers, recounting their acts of horror in intermittent cameos against a traditional backdrop of Heaven, Purgatory and Hell with Islamic saints and prophets arranged haphazardly.
Since 2006, Azari and Karimi have worked in partnership to master a revolutionary approach to painting and video art. Featured in the celebrated “Iran Inside Out” group exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York (June-September 2009), this will be the artists’ first exhibition in Europe to showcase their sensational “Oil Paintings” (2009) and Shoja Azari’s “Coffee House Painting” video (2009).
On display at East Central in London from 15th January to 27th February.
