Aria Gallery hosted a series of collages and abstract sculptures made of wood by Shahin Tabanfar. The exhibition included her wooden works, 10 paintings and collages.
The works were made from pieces of timber collected by the artist in forests or at the seashore. The abstracts were produced from what “she visualized in the pieces,” although some of the figures resembled birds, Tabanfar said, quoted by Honaronline.
Pointing to the paintings, she said a part of her collages are a combination of different materials.
The theme of her works was nature, “a paraphrased nature coming from my imagination or memories.” One of the artworks illustrated a desert made of printed pieces, paper and color. Another one, also a desert, was a combination of sand and wood. The wood pieces “were infested by insects, but I conserved them in oil before coloring them with the use of chemicals.”
Some tableaus were watercolor paintings, but there were other works with material such as stones, shells, wood and clay linked together by colors. Tabanfar said she aimed to make a change in her artworks and therefore used wood in creating the new artworks, as against watercolors in her previous works. The sculptures took 3 years to complete, but other works were created in 2014.
Shahin Tabanfar graduated in painting at Tehran’s School of Fine Arts and continued her education in painting, art history and fabric designing at New York University, the Fashion Institute of Technology and the New School for Social Research and Pratt Institute. She worked as a fabric designer in New York for four years and has held several group and solo exhibitions in Iran and the US. In March 2012, Golestan Gallery hosted her collection.
