Ayyam Gallery Dubai (DIFC) is pleased to announce Whispers of Love, the solo exhibition of Tehran-based artist and architect Ramin Shirdel, to be held from 5 May until 5 June 2014.
Whispers of Love will feature ten recent large-scale assemblage works by the artist. Each work is created using an accumulative process in which an average of fifteen hundred painted pieces come together to form layers that further come together to spell out either words or individual letters in Farsi-Arabic script. At first glance the assemblage of script in red, yellow, purple, blue, and green evoke the conceptualism of nineteen-sixties era American art. However, Shirdel’s artistic influences are much closer to home and may be traced back centuries, an immediate source being the pictorial transformations of text found in calligraphic examples of Islamic art. In Shirdel’s compositions, words built upon the surface of artworks are inspired by the theme of love and may be understood as an ashegh (lover) narrating or bestowing praise upon his beloved. The poetic tradition in Classical Persian texts addresses both worldly love and spiritual love. Worldly love in the Persian tradition finds its roots in the love stories of Shirin-Khosrow and Layla-Majnun, whereas desire for union with the divine is found in the writings of Sufi poets, Mevlana Jalal ud Din Rumi and Khwaja Shams ud Din Muhammad Hafez e Shirazi.