A solo drawing exhibition of works by Keyvan Mahjoor
Dastan’s Basement is pleased to announce the opening of Keyvan Mahjoor’s drawing exhibition “How Blue was Blue, The Blue of Sky” on June 17, 2016. The exhibition will be open for public viewing through June 25. This is Keyvan Mahjoor’s second solo show at Dastan’s Basement. During his decades of artistic career, Mahjoor’s works have been presented in several group exhibitions. Mahjoor’s work, especially his drawings, have attracted a lot of attention in the recent few years and his exhibitions in Montreal, Toronto, Beirut and Tehran have received critical acclaim.
Keyvan Mahjoor (b. 1949, Isfahan, Iran) started his artistic experiences from early childhood. Living in the historical city of Isfahan, learning Persian miniature under Haj Mosavvar al-Maleki, his teenage curiosity-fueled strolls in the city, and later his studying Persian literature in Pahlavi University of Shiraz, have contributed to the narrative aspects of Mahjoor’s creative approach. The presence of Persian literary/poetic cultures in his drawings along with miniature-inspired forms and calligraphic scripts have established Mahjoor’s work in the context of contemporary art.
“How Blue was Blue, The Blue of Sky” was inspired by Keyvan Mahjoor’s residence in Portugal under its blue sky, reading Fernando Pessoa’s (1888-1935) poetry, and the melancholy of Mahjoor’s early self-imposed exile from Iran — these works are all in black and white, but Mahjoor thinks of them as inseparable parts of the blue memories of that period and Pessoa’s poems.