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April 12 – May 14, 2014
An exhibition of contemporary paintings by Mostafa Dashti, a prominent Iranian artist, presenting the best of Dashti’s work of the last decade.

Opening reception: Saturday, April 12, 6 – 9 pm

Exhibited pieces

About this exhibition

NATURE IN ABSTRACTION is an exhibition of contemporary paintings by Mostafa Dashti, a prominent Iranian artist who lives and works in Iran. This exhibition features some breathtaking abstract landscapes for which Dashti is a master of. Although in an interview, Dashti denies he is an abstract painter by saying:

“The root of all my paintings is in nature—sky, earth, clouds and even meteoroids.  Every time I painted a subject, every element on my canvas could be traced to something in nature and the presence of these nature’s figures proves that I am not an abstract painter. Of course in some of my works, where everything including forms and figures become more condensed, a silhouette of pure abstraction crystallizes.”

The great German Sculpture Karl Schlamminger describes Dashti’s work as follows:

“There is something magic about Mostafa Dashti’s work. It is as if he had dashed fragments of dreams onto the canvas: Fragmented moments of despair. Tumbling backwards into tsunamis, tornados or glowing streams of lava he loses himself in the spiral nebulae. Dashti grabs his motifs from these tempests and tosses them as after-images into the paintings. They are not imitations but real. They are a photographic blink of the eye. What we see are seascapes and cloudscapes, ripped open horizons, faint and dramatic, distant and close fogs, as if it only could be like this. These paintings seem to be cameraless photographs processed in Dashti’s head: developed, washed and fixed in the bath of time.”

NATURE IN ABSTRACTION presents the best of Dashti’s work in the last decade.