Scottish Art in Tehran

The renowned Scottish artist David Batchelor has chosen Tehran’s Ab-Anbar Gallery to hold his first solo exhibition of artworks in Iran.  

Titled ‘Chromatology’, the exhibition comprises a collection of the artist’s most recent sculptures, drawing, painting, photography and installation, Honaronline reported. 

Among his body of works, there is a site-specific artwork named ‘Tehran Candela’ that came out of Batchelor’s trip to Tehran last year. A cluster of colorful ‘Aftabeh’ (Iranian style plastic ewer) are inverted and hung from the ceiling of the gallery, part of the display.

While he is most known for his illuminated light boxes, the artist has made color his leitmotif for the past 20 years. Batchelor takes interest in the synthetic kind of color found in the metropolis rather than the natural and subdued tones found in nature. Leyla Fakhr is the exhibition curator.

Another featured work is a series of small concrete sculptures that have shards of glass inserted into them giving them a jewel-like quality.

Drawings and paintings are the core of Batchelor’s practice. A room of ‘atomic drawings’ displayed at the gallery brings together over a hundred works on paper, with an array of mediums including highlighter, industrial tape, ink and spray paint.

The exhibition also includes his photographs of ‘Found Monochromes’, 1997-2017, shown recently at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, which are a growing series of photographs of white rectangles found in the urban environment. 

David Batchelor, 62, is an internationally renowned artist, writer and professor in fine art at Goldsmith University in London. His work is present in many international collections, including Tate, London and has been shown in numerous museums worldwide.

Batchelor has written a number of books, including the Luminous Grey (2014), Found Monochromes (2010) and Chromophobia (2000), a book on color and the fear of it from the Euro-American perspective, which is being published in Persian by Ab-Anbar.

The exhibition will run through March 3 at the venue, located at No. 2, Roshan Manesh Alley, Khaqani St.