Cavin-Morris Gallery is honored to present the first one-person presentation of drawings by Iranian artist Sarvenaz Farsian in the United States.  Her work was most recently exhibited in an important group show, Art Brut from Iran, at Halle St. Pierre in Paris.

Farsian’s drawings are intimate, so intimate that they completely change shape, and even when viewed from a distance, they do not release their hold on the eye. 

For many artists who do not make work for the mainstream canon, making art is part of a dance with the slow machinations of the passing of Time.  Weavers and embroiderers are familiar with this phenomenon.  It is how the Dine (Navajo) weavers combine open landscape with a sense of infinite movement in their works, each strand of wool creating a slow and beautiful personal rhythm.  In Farsian’s drawings as well, the mark becomes a chant, the chant becomes trancelike, and the trance destroys the concept of mundane time.  To fully understand chant and trance we must surrender to them, and by that surrender we dissolve into the textures of their renderings and empathize with their deeper meanings. 

The chant has cultural and personal resonances, especially for those artists living in politically difficult circumstances.  When freedom is not outwardly manifest, one seeks it inwardly.  The artist does this by claiming the mark and its repetition.  The marks connect and grow like mycelia, until they cover this universe.  Their cumulations do not repeat drawing to drawing but they blend and create self-contained performances of agency, and at their best as in these drawings, they become multitudes of universes.  Sarvenaz is a mediator of complex and subtle depths.  If we look generously, we receive the richness of her chant, her songs of freedom. Although composed from her deepest self they are open to all of us-and that is the power of her practice.

For further information please contact info@cavinmorris.com or call us at 212-226-3768.