Lehmann Maupin would like to announce an exhibition of new drawings by Shirazeh Houshiary. This will be the artist's third exhibition at the gallery.
The surfaces of Houshiary's drawings are meticulously constructed of innumerable fine marks, accumulating into expansive fields, auras, and halos. The layering and build up of these repeated marks create a deep and immersive drawing surface, whose radiant bands and shapes are suggestive not only of light and its absence, but also of spatial depth and the emanation of sound, breath, and vapor. The abundant, repetitive marks also recall writing and script in addition to notions of a chant or a mantra.
Houshiary will also be presenting Breath, a collaboration with architect Pip Horne, as part of Creative Time's Art on the Plaza at the Ritz-Carlton New York in Battery Park. The work, a limestone-brick tower that emits different religious chants continuously from dawn until dusk, will be presented from May 4, 2004 through January 2005.
Shirazeh Houshiary was born and raised in Iran and moved to London in 1974 to study at Chelsea School of Art. Initially recognized for her sculpture, Houshiary emerged with the "New Object" sculptors in the 1980s. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, Camden Arts Centre in London, and the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, among others, and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994. The artist continues to work and live in London.