Samira Homayouni Samira Homayouni

OPENING
Thursday, 16.11.2023, 6–9 p.m.

WELCOME
6.30 p.m.
Dr. Hans Peter Haselsteiner

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Roman Grabner, Curator Universalmuseum Joanneum, Graz
Jury Member STRABAG Artaward International

Samira Homayouni was born in 1986 in Zanjan, Iran, and studies in Vienna at the Academy of Fine Arts with Christian Schwarzwald. In recent years, the artist has developed a specific technique of painting in which she works, in short, with a colourless liquid on photographic paper. Due to the original approach, she cannot yet see the result of her brushstrokes in the process of painting, as this only develops through the reaction of the chemicals on the photographic paper. While these paintings were initially abstract and committed to the interplay of gesture and chance, she has found her way to portraiture through certain formal results. Homayouni does not paint real faces, however, but rather faces that come up to her mind that successively manifest themselves on the image carrier like an apparition. Although the artist emphasises that she is not primarily concerned with technique, but with content and expression in her painting, it is precisely in the combination of painterly and photographic processes in relation to portraiture that the special quality of her works lies.
In the exhibition, Homayouni shows exclusively new works that have been created since her participation in the STRABAG Artaward. On the one hand, there are large-format pictures of people in which she experiments with a new colourfulness and, on the other, small-format paintings that operate with the possibilities of black and white.
Roman Grabner

exhibition video
Samira Homayouni on video

>Samira Homayouni

Fotos: Nicole Viktorik