Monstera

Artist's book

Shirana Shahbazi’s oeuvre reflects an ongoing interest in the relationship between images, their surfaces and their objecthood, as well as between the various artistic media and their apparent iconic qualities. Her pictures range from color-field abstractions to volatile holiday snapshots. The artist has assembled a population of images, which handles an equal weight as a dispersed as well as a coherent body of work. This showcases an impressive transitional quality, a mastery which Shirana Shahbazi hasn’t yet grown tired to pursue. From heavy frames to delicate litho-prints, her projects talk in fragments about the artist’s genuine engagement with issues of representation as well as the presentation of images themselves.

This publication pictures Shahbazi’s recent work, taken to a compelling new level of abstraction, culminating in the free disposition of colors and geometric forms. Shahbazi stages these geometrical forms, not on a computer screen, but by arranging and staging real geometric bodies of color in her studio—as though for a still life—and by then photographing them from different perspectives. Her production style is pivotal not only for the brilliance of color; it is shining through in delicate details such as double exposures or intriguing effects of depth. Each composition allows for nuanced readings, oscillating between the two and three-dimensional, between the representational and nonrepresentational.

Shahbazi was born 1974 in Teheran, Iran. At the age of eleven, she moved to Germany. She studied photography, first in Dortmund and then in Zurich, where she also lives today and has her studio. She took part in the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and has had exhibitions in notable museums e.g.: Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012/2013), Fotomuseum Winterthur (2011), New Museum, New York (2011), The Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles (2008), Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2008), Barbican Art Gallery, London (2007).

The publication is published in collaboration with Kunsthalle Bern.