Maryam "Mimi" Amini | "Eleven 11": Dastan +2

Dastan is pleased to announce the opening of Mimi Amini’s solo exhibition “Eleven” at Dastan+2. The exhibition will be open for public viewing from October 21, 2016 through November 6. This is Mimi Amini’s first solo exhibition at Dastan. Her works have been previously featured in more than ten solo exhibitions in Iran, Italy and Lebanon, along with numerous group shows around the world.

Maryam “Mimi” Amini (b. 1977, Isfahan, Iran) is best known for works ‘that bear minimal relevance to reality’. Through years of diverse practice in drawing, painting and collage, she has produced artworks that escape commodification, yet create new forms and dialogs. Mimi’s style dominantly moves towards abstraction, but figurative elements and unique ‘lifeforms’ have their own presence.

Describing her as an “unconventional and unique artist”, the great Iranian painter Ali Nassir writes: “She resolves contradictions in an anarchic arrangement and once the viewers are stimulated by the initial shock, they immediately become entangled in a critical dialogue. The works of Maryam Amini seem playful…”

In 2011, a shipment of her works was inspected by customs officers in Turkey, who attempted to search the cargo with axes. Once the works were returned to her, she used the idea to create her cut-outs, that have gone on to be included in many of her works since then.

‘Eleven’ is an installation based around two of Mimi’s ‘mixed media and cut-outs on canvas’. Produced within the recent year, the two works have been installed in the gallery space facing each other, creating a dialog in between the contrast of the works, along the ‘liberating context’ of the symbolic language and a lane made out of canvas.