Parviz Tanavoli was born in Tehran, Iran in 1937. He received an excellent education at home and later in Italy, from which he returned to co-found an art movement, teach, stoke an international art career, then, in 1989, Iran's greatest living modern artist and now dual Canadian citizen began splitting his time between Iran and West Vancouver -- but the Lower Mainland's largest public art gallery never opened its doors to him, until now.
So the questions remains ... or is it two questions: Why did the Vancouver Art Gallery wait so long? and Just how much does the VAG need Persian/Irani community support if it is going to move into that purpose-built mall known as the Chan Centre for the Arts?
And the work? Well, the work is not what I expected, but it's not unfamiliar, either. Drawing, painting and sculpture. Pictured up top is a more recent sculpture of one of the artist's more enduring motifs, the kind of work one makes when one feels they have secured a place for themselves as a 20th century modern and feel confident enough -- or arrogant enough -- to enter into self-parody. "Look at me," this bird chirps. "I am free to be as a please."
Here is that caged bird in an earlier, more traditional iteration:
And here is the cage or gridded grill in a painting that brings to mind Philip Gaston:
Now here is the artist channeling Jasper Johns:
Rather than share with you my pictures of the floor sculptures, I urge you to see the show. It's worth seeing. But read its first didactics. Tavanoli believes the cage is not an oppressive device (or symbol), but one of freedom -- the cage being a protector of the heart (of the poet?). I would have liked to have seen more on locks, but we see ample evidence of locks in the keys commonly used to pick them. Skeleton keys these keys are called. Are they still called that? Still? For Tavanoli, a key is a stylus, the tip of a brush. With every constraint, a liberty.
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