07/02/2024
Shahla Arbabi has had a long career as an abstract painter, studying and teaching in Iran (her country of birth), Italy, and the United States. Arbabi’s abstractions are suffused with subtly toned color, light, and shadow that elicit emotions and evoke the hues and shapes of architecture and landscape. Over the last two decades, her work has become more representational in response to the crises of war, human rights abuses, population displacement, and environmental precarity that weigh heavily on the early twenty-first-century.
Bringing forward atmospheric passages from her earlier abstractions, Arbabi creates roiling seas, cloudy skies, and blazing firestorms against which silhouettes, fighter planes, and small, unstable ships suggest human struggles and vulnerabilities. Forces of destruction and decay also appear to be at work in small sculptures of crumbling architecture. In other more purely abstract paintings (such as “Black Sea”, 2023), made over a number of years and completed in 2022 and 2023, Arbabi offers an elegiac vision of the sea in moments of calm pierced by light, perhaps drawing upon memories of her youth in the Middle East.
Arbabi’s work can be viewed in “Here, in this little Bay: Celebrating 30 Years at the Kreeger” through October 5th.
Pictured:
First image, from top left to bottom right:
Shahla Arbabi, “Pollution”, 2023, mixed media on paper
Shahla Arbabi, “Separation”, 2023, mixed media on paper
Shahla Arbabi, “Takeoff”, 2023, mixed media on paper
Shahla Arbabi, “Waiting”, 2023, mixed media on board
Shahla Arbabi, “Ominous Night”, 2023, acrylic on board
Shahla Arbabi, “Spiral”, 2023, mixed media on paper
Shahla Arbabi, Frozen in Time #2, 2022, acrylic, cardboard, and metal
Image courtesy of Danbi Co.
Second image:
Shahla Arbabi, “Takeoff”, 2023, mixed media on paper Image courtesy of the artist.
Third image:
Shahla Arbabi, Frozen in Time #1, 2022, acrylic, cardboard, and metal
Image courtesy of Danbi Co.
