Shirazeh Houshiary

For the latest exhibition in East Hampton, Lisson Gallery presents a selection of paintings by Shirazeh Houshiary. Following her solo exhibition at the London gallery last year, the presentation marks the artist’s 14^th exhibition with the gallery and offers an intimate look at a group of works spanning a 20-year period.

Shown in the United States for the first time, Forgetting the Word (2020) offers a form of abstraction that is both corporeal and dreamlike. The surface buzzes with labyrinths of delicate pencil-work over a plumage of blue pigment. Mesmerizing and voltaic, the painting is the result of Houshiary’s meditative practice that employs breath as both medium and conceptual structure.

Houshiary’s process, developed over the artist’s forty-year career, begins by placing the canvases flat on the floor. Carefully moving around them, Houshiary produces layers of inscriptions on top of the sediments formed from pouring water mixed with pure pigment. Two words, the physical manifestation of breath, are repeated, layered and interwoven. Web of Light (1999), Untitled (2008), Presence V and Presence VII (both 2012) feature these careful markings in stark contrast with a black ground. ‘These paintings are very contemplative and encourage the viewer to look within. Here, synchronicity is the point of connection between the inner and outer event,’ Houshiary says of this body of work.