Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce an exhibition by Shirazeh Houshiary. She has exhibited her sculptures, paintings and drawings widely since the 1980s, and this exhibition will consist of a new body of paintings and will be the first one person exhibition of Houshiary's work in New York.
Born in Iran in 1955 and having moved to London in the early 1970s, Houshiary graduated from the Chelsea School of Art in 1979 and emerged with a group of artists including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, and Anish Kapoor. Shirazeh Houshiary has had one person exhibitions at the Musée Rath in Geneva, the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, the Camden Arts Centre in London, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Harn Museum in Gainsville Florida, Le Magasin in Grenoble, the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, and the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht among others. Nominated in 1994 by the Tate Gallery for the Turner Prize, she continues to live and work in London.
This new group of paintings is born of Houshiary's dedication to and interest in Sufism. Each painting is built up of delicate webs of graphite or pigment on either a black or a white field. Text taken from Sufi incantations are repeatedly laced into luminous surfaces, uniting the word and the image into a meditative visual experience.