Ab-Anbar gallery is proud to present ‘Ideologues of the Game and Other Seekers of the End,’ an exhibition curated by Hannah Feldman. The show marks Majid Fathizadeh’s first solo exhibition outside his native Iran, where he has been making and exhibiting work since 2003.
In two parts spread across two gallery floors, the exhibition offers a survey of drawings, paintings, watercolours, and sketchbooks from these decades, which have witnessed the artist evolve a painterly style that at once honours the traditions of European-style painting in multiple genres, but especially its predilection for allegory and symbolism, while also adhering to traditions of a parallel humanist tradition in Iran. While attentive to specific local historical events and exigencies, Fathizadeh’s dark and often large format paintings present a landscape of human behaviour underscored by the deleterious effects of ideology, be it political, religious, or nationalist that, like a game with no end, promulgate exclusionary and eliminatory thinking and its violent ends in war, oppression, and eco-genocide globally.
At the core of the exhibition’s focus is also the idea that the artist, here Fathizadeh, is also implicated in this “game” of power and privilege through the making and working with art historical forms that have historically been used to naturalise narrative of ethnic superiority and colonial impunity. Inherently ideological, art is here wrested from the purposes of this game and made to articulate counter narratives that refuse the identitarian separations between “here” and “there,” even in expectations of contemporary art practice.
