Aziz Anzabi — Contemporary Art Curator Magazine

Apr 20

Apr 20 Aziz Anzabi

Biography

Between tradition and modernity: tapping into memorial exploration to nourish collective consciousness.By placing interiority and personal experience at the service of political awareness, Aziz relentlessly questions the means we have to rethink the world in order to relieve sentiments of suffering.Experiencing Iran / Iraq War at an early age, Aziz Anzabi's encounters with iconic figures of Iranian contemporary art such as Bahman Moasses or modern poet Sohrab Sepehri radically impacted his vision. Embodying concepts of exile and oppression, Aziz Anzabi explores novel paths into the idea of free speech, shaping psychic surrealisms to awaken consciences to the violence of our over-standardized world.“I want to mix tradition into contemporary art because I think that Qajar art is the only style that is solely Iranian, with its own unique framework and techniques”.Navigating abstraction and figuration his works evokes a symbolic grammar, both biographical and collective. Anzabi's fantasized landscapes - his moving humans, his uncertain and distorted forms - are so personal that they become universal. They are in no way free from technology, quite the contrary: they would not exist without it. He is a fully committed lucid embodiment of a new form of violent poetic activism.

Artist Statement

My base technique to create artworks is using real life natural events to create artworks with images or words from an imaginary world. Throughout my art I clearly elaborated the disposition (changing the shape of an object), and morphing of objects. I have long been intrigued and fascinated by these concepts. In my sculptures and painting, both figurative and abstract, I employ these aspects of a collective unconscious to evoke an emotional state within the viewer. In my figurative work, my goal is to capture the myriad changing state of the human condition through subtle changes in facial countenance and body language. The end result shows how the inner condition is expressed by the outward form while also conveying a timeless quality to human emotion. In my abstract sculptures, I have recreated the numinous quality of subconsciously shared images, stories, and ceremonial rites. The sculptures, themselves, are composed of abstract forms that are covered with a rich, textured surface. The end result is a complex organic piece that evokes a sense of ancient artefacts, of ritualistic objects from some unknown culture, or of imagined landscapes.

What first prompted you to think of becoming an artist?
My dad pushed me towards art from a childhood which influenced me to love making art.

What kind of an artist do you ultimately see yourself?
An international artist who helps raise awareness about politics and social problems.

What are you hoping to communicate to the viewer through your work?

I like to be the voice of the silent crowd who are afraid to speak in fear of their governments.

Can you explain the process of creating your work?

To produce my artworks I first try to assess what news grabs my attention and would be more impactful on the public. Then through using my own symbols I come up with a design that I'm happy with. Depending on the theme sometimes I use the technique of peeling paper to create different textures, otherwise I just use oil paint to create a soft texture on the canvas to portray a more fragile topic.

What is your favourite part of the creative process?

My favourite part is starting to put paint on the canvas. For sculptures my favourite part is when I can finally portray my 2D design into a 3D object.

Can you give us an insight into current projects and inspiration, or what we can look forward to from you in the near future?

I have a new project where I want to show the opposite perspective to my series "don't judge me" where I show the negative aspects of judgement and stereotypes towards people in the world. I want to show that people are neither fully good nor fully bad. Another project I started 5 years ago and is ongoing is where I'm trying to put pieces of jewellery on the canvas to portray the richness of the clothes of the Qajar royal family, which I think would be finished by next year. In this project I'm trying to demonstrate how most of the time powerful dictators hid their weakness behind jewellery.

Website https://www.azizanzabi.com/

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