Farah Ossouli | "Wounded Virtue": Dastan +2

TEHRAN – December 25, 2015. Dastan+2 is pleased to invite you to the opening of Farah Ossouli’s solo exhibition entitled “Wounded Virtue” on December 25. The exhibition will be open for public viewing through January 20. This is Farah Ossouli’s first solo exhibition in Dastan.

Farah Ossouli (b. 1953, Zanjan, Iran), during her thirty-year career as an artist, has achieved a unique fusion of techniques, materials, themes, and storytelling, which has evolved into her personal style. She has been a pioneer in introducing contemporary themes and ideas into miniature painting, before this practice was widely adopted by many of the region’s artists such as Imran Qureshi and Shahzia Sekandar.

The expressive aspects of Farah Ossouli’s works are the results of her narrative style. She has used Persian poetry in many of her works, including the “Hafez” series, to create a context, but the unique feature of her work is the structures she forms on this context. The use of rich visual and literary cultures, along with traditional and contemporary tools, has made her works universal. The acquisition of her works by notable museums and collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), is perhaps a result of this aspect.

In most of the paintings of the “Wounded Virtue” series, which were created over the course of more than three years, Farah Ossouli has drawn inspiration from famous works of art. Also, in all the works, lines of poetry by Forough Farrokhzad or Ahmad Shamlou, both notable contemporary Iranian poets, have been used in the form of handwritten texts in the borders. Farah Ossouli has called on the creators of those images and the poets of these lines, and has structured her own narrative in their company.