Maryam Motallebzadeh | EIN HAUCH VOM LEBEN | Galerie Z22 | 04.05-30.05.2024

until 04.05. | #4278ARTatBerlin | Galerie Z22 presents from 04. May 2024 the exhibition  EIN HAUCH VOM LEBEN by the artist Maryam Motallebzadeh.

Maryam Motallebzadeh comes from Iran, where she won an art prize at the age of 13. She studied, went to Ramsar on a travelling scholarship and ran her own gallery in Tehran for around 20 years, where she took part in the Biennial of Painting at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1995 and 1997 and since then in exhibitions in various European countries before moving to Germany in 1999. Here she studied again, at the University of the Arts in Bremen, and graduated with a diploma.

Whether painting, ink drawing on paper, installation or film – Maryam Motallebzadeh’s artworks can be understood as a kind of contemporary witness – created in awareness of certain times in her life and the influence of certain social and political circumstances that affect the artist’s experience and thinking. This is another reason why travelling and encounters with other cultures have always been an important source of inspiration for her artistic themes. Exhibitions by the Iranian-born artist often have the character of rooms that are filled like diaries with notes and traces of thoughts, feelings and experiences from an eventful life. Moving between Orient and Occident, the artist has intensively explored themes such as home, identity, language and the relationship between self and nature.
The exhibition “Carried by the Wind” focuses on the theme of fate and brings together works that are formally characterised by a particular lightness and dynamism. Here too, however, one quickly encounters tense passages, be it where passionately atomising red attacks soft white surfaces, or where the motif of the veil opens up a complex field of meaning consisting of concealment and revelation, strangeness and intimacy, rejection and seduction. In the installation “Behind the Veil”, for example, Maryam Motallebzadeh works with the symbolism that this motif had in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. There, the veil stood for the intersection between life and death, between deception and realisation, death and rebirth.
Some of the works shown in the exhibition were created during the coronavirus pandemic and emphasise the current explosive nature of questions about transience, uncertainty and, last but not least, love.

Vernissage: Saturday, 04. May 2024, 7:00 – 10:00 pm