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拍品专文
This was the first body of work I made on linen. I remember coming across an image of a lamb being flayed and really responding to that violent act of removing the skin. The specifics of that ritual (Eid al-Adha) were somewhat irrelevant. I wanted to concentrate on the aggressive act of removing a body part, what that meant and what that could yield. The skin, the body, and the flesh have always claimed my attention. The fact that this was a lamb obviously connects to western conceptions of “purity” and “innocence”—at the time I wanted to debunk that.
– Hayv Kahraman
Hayv Kahraman was born in Baghdad, Iraq 1981, now lives and works in Los Angeles. Informed by her own experience as an Iraqi/Kurdish refugee assimilating in Europe and the US, Kahraman explores the experience of hypervisibility and invisibility of the othered body, embodying not only herself but also a collective experience.
Influenced by Persian miniatures, Renaissance and Chinese painting, art nouveau and fashion illustrations, Kahraman’s works convey a timeless classicism, setting her very contemporary dialogues within the rich fabric of history. Kahraman often portrays her figures with elongated swan-like necks, heightening their delicate refinement and physical and social vulnerability. The flattened perspective in her work conceives two-dimensionality as a conceptual contrast between joy and pain, illusion and reality and peace and violence.
Painted directly onto stretched linen, Flaying The Lamb contrasts the natural rough weave of the canvas with Kahraman’s highly polished painting technique in the representation of the sumptuous fabric of the figures’ dresses, heightening the spatial illusion. Though using a limited palette and simplified planar compositions, Kahraman achieves a tremendous amount of depth in her work through the intensity of her colours and layered patterning. Kahraman conveys this with remarkable fluency: the whites of the lamb sparkle with the dazzle of inlaid pearl and the black masses of hair expand like giant inky spills, echoing the opulence of antiquity.
– Hayv Kahraman
Hayv Kahraman was born in Baghdad, Iraq 1981, now lives and works in Los Angeles. Informed by her own experience as an Iraqi/Kurdish refugee assimilating in Europe and the US, Kahraman explores the experience of hypervisibility and invisibility of the othered body, embodying not only herself but also a collective experience.
Influenced by Persian miniatures, Renaissance and Chinese painting, art nouveau and fashion illustrations, Kahraman’s works convey a timeless classicism, setting her very contemporary dialogues within the rich fabric of history. Kahraman often portrays her figures with elongated swan-like necks, heightening their delicate refinement and physical and social vulnerability. The flattened perspective in her work conceives two-dimensionality as a conceptual contrast between joy and pain, illusion and reality and peace and violence.
Painted directly onto stretched linen, Flaying The Lamb contrasts the natural rough weave of the canvas with Kahraman’s highly polished painting technique in the representation of the sumptuous fabric of the figures’ dresses, heightening the spatial illusion. Though using a limited palette and simplified planar compositions, Kahraman achieves a tremendous amount of depth in her work through the intensity of her colours and layered patterning. Kahraman conveys this with remarkable fluency: the whites of the lamb sparkle with the dazzle of inlaid pearl and the black masses of hair expand like giant inky spills, echoing the opulence of antiquity.