Aidin Xankeshipour | "Stranger": Dastan's Basement

TEHRAN – February 17, 2016. Dastan’s Basement is pleased to announce the opening of Aidin Xankeshipour’s solo exhibition “Stranger” on February 19, 2016. The exhibition will be open for public viewing through February 27. This is Aidin Xankeshipour’s second solo exhibition at Dastan’s Basement. Aside from his curatorial projects in Dastan, his work has been previously featured in group exhibitions at Dastan as well as a Dastan Outside the Basement project at Sam Art (Tehran).
In “Stranger”, Aidin Xankeshipour returns to drawing to challenges himself with this medium. For Aidin, the spirit of drawing and its characteristics of improvisation, speed, linear qualities, simplicity and availability, create a “transparent soul” — one that the artist keeps coming back to.
In this series, which took about a year to finish, Aidin has used handmade ink to draw portraits and plants on paper and canvas. Using ink, he has been able to keep close to the spirit of drawing on both surfaces. The images in this series all refer to the world outside of the artist’s mind: he has drawn portraits of his loved ones along with plants. Aidin views plants as characteristically similar to human beings, with attributes such as growth, melancholy, solitude and fantasy, all being key elements that caused him to use plant forms mixed or along with his portraits.