Avish Khebrehzadeh at Conner Contemporary Art

Monday, 12 June 2006 12:55

Washington, DC - Conner Contemporary Art exhibits new paintings and video animation by Avish Khebrehzadeh.  The poetic sensibilities of this accomplished Washington, D.C.  - based artist stem from her childhood memories of the underground art movement in post-Revolution Tehran.  Seeking to experience a different cultural approach to art, Khebrehzadeh later studied in Rome, where she absorbed the essential simplicity of Giotto’s paintings and cultivated an appreciation for the reductive visual language of the Arte Povera movement.

In her new video animation, A Swim, she draws inspiration from a figure removing his robe in the background of Piero della Francesco’s 15th c. Baptism of Christ.  This gesture unfolding in the context of water encapsulates what the Khebrehazadeh describes as the depth and fluidity of a moment frozen in time.  Through her drawings for the animation she captures the universality of this concept by setting an isolated figure in motion through an expansive body of water, a recurring motive in her work.  The artist projects the swimmer’s symbolic journey through life onto Theatre a large-scale painting of a romantic theater interior, thereby imparting historical warmth as well as a collective frame of reference.

For this exhibition, Khebrehzadeh further amplifies the life-narrative for her audience in a series of small-scale oil paintings on canvas and wood panel.  She probes the essence of identity with iconic animal imagery and scenes of human figures performing simple activities.  These images thematize the duality between human and animal existence that, in her conception, stimulates us to see our own characteristics in animals in reduced or exaggerated capacities.