“I have learned from
the past and shaped my own artistic practice.”
Mohammad Bozorgi
Mohammad Bozorgi
The Iranian calligraphy artist Mohammad Bozorgi’s ambition is to create
his own language. As he states on his website “My desire is to create a new
language, one that is based in traditional Persian and Arabic forms but
communicates through abstraction.”
About which he elaborates, saying ‘Writing for me is the
beauty and grandeur of a noble sense which without doubt refers to my cultural
emotions and my intellectual and mental structure of calligraphy and religious
faith. Although the public observers of today’s calligraphy do not believe in
the historic purity of it; however my attempt whether successful or not is to
reach to a certain source of purity.”
Bozorgi started studying traditional calligraphy in his
early teens at summer courses in the subject and over the ensuing 15 years he
studied 18 classical calligraphy forms of which he mastered 10 and in 2009 was
awarded Momtaz (Outstanding/excellent) Degrees from the Calligraphy Association
of Iran. Along the way Bozorgi picked up a BA in Biomedical Engineering and a
MBA Degree from the Industrial Management Institute of Tehran.
He eventually broke ranks with the traditionalists for being,
well, traditionalists, as he says “I stopped my collaboration and training with
the Society because I found they were too restrictive and did not allow any
innovation to the calligraphic forms with which they were working.”
As he explained to the Project
Gallery Cap-Ferrat “After all these classical practices, I started to work
with canvases, colours and other materials, I studied graphic and was really
keen to try new things, just like now. I have no fear to deform the letters,
similar to a child playing with kid’s clay! Unlike many other calligraphers, I
prefer to suffuse my canvas from letters, as Jackson Pollock did by colours. I
am living with words and letters, they are dynamic in my works and frames
cannot restrict their motion.”
Today Bozorgi combines the aesthetics of contemporary
painting with the abstraction inherent in the textual base of Islamic art.
As the publicity for his current exhibition states “Combining
the illusionistic, multidimensional perspective of Op art with the intricate
symmetry and pictorial invention of Islamic manuscripts, Bozorgi creates
compositions that appear to palpitate as Arabic and Persian texts are freed
from linear orientation. Morphing into fluid forms that float, swarm, or rotate
across the canvas, the semiotic meaning of the artist’s calligraphy changes as
it seems to go beyond its original realm of spirituality with allusions to
material subjects and realities, bringing the sacred domain of devotion closer
to perceptual experience.”
Bozorgi’s current exhibition Against the Darkness is on show at Ayyam’s Dubai
Gallery until the 25th of August.
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