Hadi Hazavei: The Last Strand
January 23rd-February 27th
Shirin Gallery NY is pleased to announce this Thursday's opening of "The Last Strand" by Hadi Hazavei, running from January 23rd-February 27th. Congruent with the gallery's focus on unexplored perspectives within modern and contemporary artistic movements from Iran and surrounding regions, the exhibition is a first instantiation of the gallery's ongoing engagement with Hazavei's practice. Thursday's event will run from 6-8 pm at Shirin Gallery NY, followed by an afterparty at Le Baron lounge. An interview-style biography of Hazavei, conducted in Farsi by Darioush Kiaras, will be available for sale.
"The Last Strand" features two bodies of the artist's investigative, almost alchemical paintings in dialog with his latest body of sculptural objects, tracing the tension between process and permenance as it is refined over the many years of Hazavei's artistic practice. The exhibition takes its title from the Farsi expression, Sim-e-Akhar, which connotes the resounding chord that concludes a symphony, or the willfully reckless act of a gambler who throws his last coin on the table with nothing left to lose. Resonating with joyful vitality, "The Last Strand" presents Hazavei's artistic practice as a life of potentiality that eludes completion.
Hadi Hazavei is an artist, scientist, educator, and scholar known for his multifaceted and mecurial career. His artistic practice takes influence from aesthetic traditions as varied as Persian calligraphy, carpet-weaving and folk art to Iran's Saghakhaneh school and Euro-American abstract expressionism. Hazavei attended Tehran University's Fine Arts College between 1960-1968 while teaching science at a high school in the desert town of Aradan. He has travelled extensively before settling in New York City, where he competed a PhD in Art Education at Columbia University and conducted post-doctoral research in Museum Studies at New York University until 1989. He has authored numerous book on art and education; exhibited work and organized dozens of exhibitions internationally; and produced murals for towns throughout the United States and in his early home in Aradan. What Abbas Kiarostami noted in a 1963 review of one of Hazavei's first significant exhibitions still holds true to the artist's creative practice as much as his life: the forms weave together while external constraints fall away.
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