Zuleika Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of work by Manijeh Yadegar (1951-2016), the Iranian born abstract artist. Elemental will be the first comprehensive exhibition of Yadegar’s work since 2008, and the second time the artist has exhibited in Venice.
Elemental will display previously unseen paintings by Yadegar and explore the enduring influence of the natural world and memory on Yadegar’s work. Yadegar is known for her serene and completely abstract paintings. Yadegar’s palette is usually fairly muted, but there are occasional surprising and delightful pops of colour – such as in C17-2013 which has a vibrant orange burning through the muted overlay. In some of Yadegar’s paintings, she references the colour itself, as with ‘Diffused Carmine’. Yadegar worked consistently and dedicatedly to create paintings that are visual equivalents to the sublime. This is a powerful body of work that exudes striking beauty alongside a strong contemplative quality.
For Yadegar, the act of creation was very physical. Although some of the works in the exhibition are very small – indeed the paintings at DD47 are exclusively so – many are much larger and these paintings presented a physical as well as intellectual challenge for the slight Yadegar. Of their physicality she wrote, `The resultant marks and washes echo the physical rhythms of the body. Areas of dark and light take turns in the dominant role. There is a strong element of spatial interweaving, an interplay between figure and ground, a contrasting of soft and hard edge changing the focus from sharp to hazy. They develop observations of the natural world into completely abstract images; memories of places, moments in time, the transition between night and day, dawn to dusk. I would wish the paintings to have a contemplative beauty and to transmit light with a sensation of calm, but strong feeling’.
Yadegar moved to London from Iran in 1964 at the age of the 13. In 1976 she enrolled at Chelsea College of Art where she met her husband the sculptor and Royal Academician Nigel Hall. She continued her studies in 1977 at Camberwell College of Art and soon began her exhibiting career. During her lifetime she was the subject of five solo exhibitions in South Korea, Sweden and London and contributed to over 50 joint exhibitions worldwide. Yadegar has exhibited in Venice before, as in 2007 she took part in the group show with Sothebys ‘Venice: City of Dreams’, where artists she exhibited alongside included Langlands & Bell, Nigel Hall, Christopher Le Brun, William Pye, Richard Wentworth and Bill Woodrow.
Yadegar’s work is represented in the collections of Deutsche Bank, London, The Contemporary Art Society, London and many private collections in England and overseas.