Lawrie Shabibi is delighted to announce its return to Art Basel Hong Kong in the Insights sector with a two-person booth presentation of new works by Hamra Abbas and Shahpour Pouyan.
Abbas will present two related bodies of work. The first is a work in progress consisting of a series of miniature portraits of food sellers in Little India, Singapore. The second Please Do Not Step: Loss of a Magnificent Story is a floor-based installation of marble inlay. In this presentation the artist extracts various cultural references and re-contextualises them using appropriated artistic techniques to probe today’s most pertinent topic: the story of migration.
Pouyan will present works from his Miniature series in which he reworks illustrations from celebrated Persian manuscripts, editing out the details which are mythological, anachronistic or since vanished, updating them for a present-day Iran. The figures are all eradicated from the images, whilst architecture and animals such as deer and
rabbits remain. Such is the appearance of Iran today - stripped of such characters yet with remnants of the past. Traditional readings of the presence of human figures in Persian miniatures are that the absence of landscape shows a particular interest in man, that through the removal of perspective, a more egalitarian distribution of figures in the picture is made possible thus each figure is provided with its unique space.
For the press release, click here.
