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Solitary

Ab-Anbar gallery is pleased to showcase an exhibition of the artworks by Baktash Sarang, an interdisciplinary artist who, basically, works on human body and its connection to the habitat and surrounding. In his artworks he makes use of different mediums, such as drawing, architecture, sculpture and most recently installation and model-making.

Born in 1981, in Tehran, he started his trainings in fine arts at IRIB art school. Later on, he received his BA degree in visual arts from Azad University of Art and Architecture in 2005, after which he moved to France, where he is currently living and working. He successfully finished his course in Metal sculpture at Haute Écoles des Arts du Rhin, HEAR, Strasbourg, in 2012, and soon after, he was selected as artist in residence at Académie des Beaux Arts, Institut de France, Fondation Dufraine, Paris, France for three years. He, then, furthered his study at Université Paris 1, pantheon-Sorbonne, Paris, France and achieved his MA in 2015. A year later, he was accepted at Casa de Velazquez as a member of French Academy in Madrid.

In an essay on Sarang’s works, Azadeh Zafarani writes,” … Sarang belongs to a generation of “post-revolutionary” ideals” and “war”; a dual paradox that has one foot in building and the other in destruction, one foot in unity and the other in isolation, one foot in hope and the other in despair; a generation that stretches between enormity of ideologies and smallness of “selves”. Sarang renders Utopias. He constructs them and destroys them. He initiates them and interrupts them. He fragments them and embodies them. His forensic dissection is often artistically treaded together to create an environment of discovery where the viewer unconsciously plunges into his/her discovery of “self”. The fulcrum of his works is always an “individual” and his/her minimal space of “being”; a kind of space that is free of extras and equipped with necessities. Sometimes in format of a New Babylon that can be carried on shoulders of its possessor and other times in format of cells, Sarang pictures the reduction of societies into walking architectural entities that resemble half-humans in ancient mythologies only his are not half-animal but half-architectural monuments.”

The central theme of the exhibition, Solitary, in which a selection of his most recent drawings together with a number of installations will be showcased, is human body, which is rather emblematic in his drawings. However, in his installations the relation to human body is more abstract; it emerges as human size and scale in the sculptures and the connection of the space, when filled by the presence of the audience, to the human body.

Azadeh Zafarani continues,”… the evolution of his work depicts the evolution of his creatures from deformed faces and headless bodies to architecturally infused bodies that eventually submerge in the power of form and containment. As merleau-ponty describes it nicely, as if “our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument. And when we wish to move about, we do not move the body as we move an object”.”