at Elizabeth Moss Gallery
 |
| Samira Abbassy, Nocturnal Bird Spirit, Collage, acrylic, gouache on board, 11 x 14 in, 27.9 x 35.6 cm. Courtesy the artist, Elizabeth Moss Gallery and Whitehot Magazine. |
by Noah Becker, Whitehot Magazine
Samira Abbassy was born in Ahwaz, Iran in 1965. When she was a child, her family moved to London. Her early days—settling into new surrounds—would be deeply influential on her poetic, symbolic and surreal paintings. She graduated from Canterbury College of Art, and started showing her works in London. At this early stage of her career, she already had a distinctive style.
It was in 1998 that Abbassy decided to tackle the monolith that is New York. During this phase of her career the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and the EFA Studio Center were both developed with her assistance. This gave her a foothold in the upper echelons of the New York art world.
Major museums came calling—the Metropolitan, the British Museum—her works were internationally collected. Abbassy’s paintings fit into the canon of art history with museum artists like Paul Klee, Odilon Redon, Theodore Gercault and Jacob Lawrence. These are quiet artists who prefer to immerse viewers in color and unlock private spaces full of symbolism and mystery. Her latest exhibition at Elizabeth Moss Gallery invites us into that world.
The influence of 19th century Qajar Court paintings has played a big role in her work for over 30 years but Abbassy also has European aspects to her style—images of figures and animals caught in symbolic transformation.
The works also call to mind the visions of Odilon Redon, whose mysterious hybrids and spectral presences carried the aura of dreams. Abbassy, too, works with ambiguity and archetype, but her vocabulary is distinctly her own: at once Persian, diasporic, and rooted in the fluid currents of New York.
Abbassy’s painting titled Ensouled shows a figure looking somewhat confrontationally at the viewer. Flowing transparent clouds with delicate line work enhances the feeling of this lone figure, who seems to be stoically standing in a garden with birds and flower bushes. The sky is swirling, almost into shapes evocative of faces in the clouds.
The plants have a decorative function in the picture, with birds fluttering with movement and life within the arrangement of the flowers and leaves. A large pointing finger enters from the right side in an almost condemning gesture from the heavens. This sense of potential doom and monumentality adds a great deal of mystery and drama to these works.
There is an innocence in her compositions not unlike Henri Rousseau's surreal yet dream-like canvasses. The figures and hybrid figures connect with this lush dreamy environment, inviting us to address the history of dreaming and the history of visionary art.
Abbassy plays with scale like Rousseau, forwarding themes of the sublime and the terrifyingly beautiful yet uncontrollable monumentality of the natural world.
The figures and their oddities rebel against the idealized 19th century Qajar Court paintings the artist cites as a major influence. But Abbassy's use of rich colors relates nicely to Qajar paintings but updates the palette to a more modern sensibility.
The painting "There are no Demons when You are Self Possessed", has a wonderful reddish-brown glow, almost a rose colored ground - contrasting with a turquoise blue sky. This color combination is a rich backdrop to the mysterious communication floating in the air from the three-horn human-like figure on the right.
The horned figure on the right of the picture stands above another figure partly swaddled in a blanket with exposed breasts. The bare-chested figure observes the horned figure as it communicates silent messages into the landscape and towards a half-human half-bird sitting in a tree.
Is the figure a demon? A potent symbol of the nocturnal shadow world, communicating with the bird figure through a secret means of communication? Or does it symbolize a friend to the figure on the reddish ground? Perhaps the horned figure is a fertitly goddess? This sort of wonderful incoherance is what dreams are about and is the stongest aspect of Abbassy's work.
Second Moon #3, shows nocturnal swimmers but the swimmers are almost drowning each other. Hands frantically clasped over mouths in a psychic battle for air amongst the waves. Are these different people or a multiple of the dreamer? It could be the artist as a multiple self portrait as she submerges and battles with herself in the dream-nightmare?
I found this piece to be loaded with ambiguity and deeply charged emotionally.
When we get to Ocean Series #4, the mood is similar but not of a frantic swimming scene. This piece is more about drifting in the tides, accepting one's fate and allowing the intense blue waves to carry the protagonists wherever they might end up.
Abbassy's water paintings are in line with Theodore Gercault's Raft of the Medusa, from the cannon of European painting so influential on 19th century Qajar Court painting. If Abbassy had Gercault in mind is supposition on the writer's part but perhaps the influence of 19th Century European painting is still making its way into the artist's ouvre?
With this new body of work, Abbassy confirms what her career has already shown: that she is a painter of rare vision, unafraid to map the interior wilderness of the psyche. Her art does not resolve its mysteries—it deepens them, leaving us changed by what we have seen.
In the current art landscape, Abbassy’s practice feels both singular and urgently relevant. Alongside other diasporic women artists who braid cultural memory with contemporary symbolism, she is part of a movement that refuses to flatten identity into a single narrative. Instead, she insists on complexity, layering past and present, myth and autobiography.
Her dream-logic paintings resist easy interpretation, yet they resonate with the wider search for meaning in an age of displacement and flux. In this way. Abbassy reminds us that painting can still be a vessel for mystery, transformation, and the infinite multiplicity of the self. WM
See more images here
No comments:
Post a Comment