Shirana Shahbazi is one of the most important representatives of contemporary Swiss photographic art. In 2012, in the group exhibition La jeunesse est un art. Jubiläum Manor Kunstpreis 2012, with the space-filling work Untitled II-2012, she enjoyed a prominent appearance in the Aargauer Kunsthaus. Now, thanks to a donation by the Friends of the Aargau Art Collection, this group of works, with which Shirana Shahbazi was first represented in the collection, is now part of the Kunsthaus collection.
For many years Shirana Shahbazi has been resolutely devoted to the medium of analogue photography, and has explored the complexity of the photographic image in constantly changing experimental arrangements. While shots of landscapes and dazzlingly beautiful classical still lifes and portraits arranged in the studio have shaped her artistic language over the last few years, recently she has shown a tendency towards abstract pictorial worlds. With gloriously colourful compositions of geometrical elements, the artist creates highly suggestive images. Colour fields are superimposed on one another and create a spatiality of their own, but elude clear classification and, as ambiguous spatial patterns, challenge the viewer’s perception. The simplicity and precision of the geometrical vocabulary are confronted by the overall impression of a complex structure of surface and depth. Within this tense duality the varied spectrum of possibilities of the medium of photography opens up, one which in its comprehension never merely providing a precise depiction of reality, but rather blurs together the precise and the diffuse, the invented and the documentary, the constructed and the real.
With conceptual severity and an openness that includes chance, in the self-enclosed group of works Untitled II-2012 Shirana Shahbazi investigates the different layers of meaning of images. In a dramatic arrangement following an internal logic, different pictorial genres are combined and presented on a spatio-geometrical mural. This extends the interpretation of the image: in direct proximity with abstract compositions, landscapes, still lifes, representations of figures or portraits assume a graphic quality. These abstract works follow on from the most recent pictorial inventions in which, with great forethought, Shirana Shahbazi assembles colourfully painted structures and walls in the studio into abstract arrangements of form and space. In the process she takes the technique of multiple exposure to its boundaries and, by interweaving different pictorial levels produces impressive spatial depths of mysterious charisma and seductive quality.
