[ad_1]
Multidisciplinary artist Faig Ahmed’s rugs hold on the wall like work and sometimes seem to soften onto the ground in swimming pools of colour. Ahmed’s surrealist strategy to textile artwork blurs the road between craft, wonderful artwork, and optical phantasm, but it’s nonetheless grounded in a wealthy custom of carpet-weaving that goes again centuries.
Ahmed is an Azerbaijani artist who lives and works in Baku. Possessing an anthropologist’s affinity for analysis, he views the carpet as a metaphor, an artwork piece, and a language system. He weaves symbols and colours the best way a poet would weave phrases to look at philosophical and aesthetic concepts.
“He’s a scholar of languages and tradition,” mentioned Nina Levent, Ph.D., Founding Director of Sapar Modern Gallery. “He sees patterns as a linguistic system and a supply code for civilization, a option to carry data ahead—cultural, religious, inventive data.”
Ahmed’s curiosity in poetry is echoed within the titles of his works from 2021, which embrace the names Shams Tabrizi and Nizami Ganjavi, each Twelfth-century Persian poets and religious masters. Ahmed exhibited this sequence, together with one rug he began a month earlier than the pandemic, at Sapar Modern final yr. These collectible rugs may be acquired by means of the gallery, ranging in value from $70,000 to $200,000.
The biggest (and most costly) rug Ahmed has accomplished thus far—Doubts 2020 (2021)—begins with the intricate patterns of a conventional Azerbaijani carpet earlier than seeming to spill right into a surreal swirl of burgundy, blue, pale inexperienced and yellow, which gathers in an summary rainbow of colours on the ground.
The glitchy, surreal nature of his work can partly be attributed to the expertise he makes use of. Ahmed begins every rug with a digital drawing. He then sketches the design on a pc earlier than transferring it to a particular engineering paper the place each knot within the rug is accounted for. Subsequent, he palms the sketches to Azerbaijani textile employees and carpet-makers, who weave the carpet from wool or silk thread that has been hand-dyed with pure hues. The weaving course of takes two to 4 extremely expert ladies wherever from two and a half to 6 months to finish.
Ahmed is a part of a wealthy tradition of workmanship and a brand new wave of Azerbaijani artists looking for to discover and stretch the chances of their inherited medium. Chingiz Babayev has been paving the best way for conceptual carpet artwork for the reason that mid-’90s when he wove leaves and fruits to create an Azerbaijanian carpet that he displayed in public areas, whereas multidisciplinary artist Farid Rasulov carpeted a whole room, from ceiling to ground to furnishings, for the Azerbaijani Pavilion of the 2013 Venice Biennale. Faig Ahmed himself represented Azerbaijan on the nation’s inaugural pavilion on the Venice Biennale in 2007.
Meka Boyle
[ad_2]
Source link
