Simine Paris est une plate-forme inédite de galerie d’art contemporain, dédiée exclusivement aux artistes iraniens, avec pour ambition de leur être un point d’ancrage en Europe, de les représenter, d’exposer et de vendre leur travail le plus largement possible, et ce faisant, de participer à l’essor de la scène artistique iranienne, florissante et essentielle.
Simine Paris and Amenor Contemporary
present the work of:
Fereydoun AVEHamid SHAMSMorteza KHOSRAVIand Jazeh TABATABAI
at the Palais d'Iéna
Curated by Leila Varasteh
Katayoun Rouhi at the Palais de Chaillot
Iranian artist Katayoun Rouhi will be in the spotlight at the Chaillot National Dance Theater as part of the Menart Fair off-site program.
Saturday September 16 from 10 a.m. to Sunday 6 p.m., non-stop.
As part of the #OnDanseChezVous charity event, Menart Fair, in partnership with Chaillot – Théâtre national de la Danse, invites choreographer Mehdi Kerkouche to bring visual arts and choreographic performances into dialogue.
“Towards the no-where”
A girl’s back, on a path lined with trees calligraphed with poetry.
Katayoun Rouhi was born in Iran in 1965. A graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, she defended a thesis on the origin of the creation of a work, on ” the place “ where the work “takes place”. The question of place, the place of birth, the place of being, the place of the soul, is a fundamental question in the work of Katayoun Rouhi. A theme that she explores, inspired by these philosopher-poets who were the Persian neoplatonists Sohravardi and Attar, for whom the symbolic question of place, where we come from and where we return is central.
“Towards the no-where”, the title of the work, evokes the “na koja abad” of the philosopher Sohravardi, the land of the no-where which is, no longer the space in which the mind would be, but the space that is in the mind, inside oneself. In the same way, the figure of the tree which returns in the work of Katayoun Rouhi like an irresistible resonance, evokes Persian miniatures where the tree symbolizes the place of self-realization, the path towards oneself and characterizes according to the artist, not “a simplistic plea for ecology” but the idea of the presence of the tree “as that which exists in itself and for itself”.
Finally, memory and childhood memories are represented by the image of the little girl going up a path. Katayoun Rouhi’s sensitivity is expressed in her painting but also in her words, in her poetry which she deploys in her paintings. She sows fertile letters in her painting, by calligraphing her own poems, but in reverse, since the very trace of writing, this “subtle body” like the great Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi, is enough to embody the paths that lead to the soul.
We connect collectors with emerging and established Iranian artists
Supporting our artists in their creation is one of our main missions:
Present their work to collectors and art lovers, and thus support them in their artistic evolution or contribute to preserving their heritage.
In this context, introducing our clients to well-known, recognized or emerging Iranian artists, from the oldest to the youngest generation, to present and sell the work of our artists, is one of our essential objectives.
Artists
We connect collectors with artists…
Supporting our artists in their creation is one of our main missions:
Present their work to collectors and art lovers, and thus support them in their artistic evolution or contribute to preserving their heritage.
In this context, introducing our clients to well-known, recognized or emerging Iranian artists, from the oldest to the youngest generation, to present and sell the work of our artists, is one of our essential objectives.
Collectors
Presenting the work of artists to as many people as possible is one of the most important aspects of our work. Our exhibitions, online platform and participation in art fairs and shows aim to create as many opportunities as possible to connect artists with collectors and art lovers.
Our commitment is to put our expertise at the service of collectors and buyers for solid and perfectly reliable acquisitions, thus creating opportunities for discovery of Iranian artists and acquisitions of quality works in a trusted professional environment.
“Iranian Abstraction” Exhibition
The “Iranian Abstraction” exhibition was an opportunity for Simine Paris to present the work of three major artists of Iranian abstract art:
- Mohsen Vaziri Moghadam
- Farideh Lashai
- Golnaz Fathi
Interview by Sarah Doraghi with Leila Varasteh, Artistic Director of Simine Paris and curator of the exhibition. In the presence of the artist Golnaz Fathi and Farideh Lashai‘s daughter, Manely, followed by a moving interview with her on her mother’s work.
Morteza Khosravi is an Iranian artist born in 1988 in Bojnurd. His work is praised in Iran and abroad. His refined and technically strong style allows him a realistic and lively artistic expression. He gives us to see and feel his subjects, a talent and a style that put him at the heart of things in his native country where he lives and works.
At this very particular moment, when Iran is experiencing a revolutionary movement led by a youth that aspires to freedom, we are witnessing the echo of this momentum in the work of young Iranian artists and an exceptional artistic renaissance.
Morteza Khosravi is one of these young artists.
His paintings and drawings of women’s bodies are particularly significant for this courage and freedom: while it is forbidden in Iran to represent women other than covered and veiled, here we have before our eyes, refined drawings and paintings, placed with grace and beauty on the canvas, and which allows us to see the woman, her body, her hair, and implicitly, the FREEDOM in motion.
Born in 1990 in Tehran, Hamid Shams graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Paris 8 and in photography/video from the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris.
His work offers original narratives, mixing fiction and reality, by establishing a dialogue between literary works, life paths and current political considerations. His works take the form of a set of elements – sculptures, photographs, paintings, soundtracks and plays of light – which come to compose spaces with a claimed theatricality, in which mysterious pieces are played, nourished by multiple influences that we manage, by means of a few clues, to decipher and interpret.
Through this work of biographical perspective, he questions the way in which individuals are constructed in normative societies by comparing the contexts – the one in which he grew up and the one in which he now evolves, settled in the West. The personal facts summoned by the artist, taken from his story as a voluntarily “displaced” individual, testify to our ways of being in the world, our capacities to accept or refuse, our strengths and our weaknesses.
Born in Iran in 1965, Katayoun Rouhi is a painter and poet. After the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne where she was admitted at the age of 19, she continued her training at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and worked with the Pierre Caron workshop.
She completed her career with studies of art, philosophy, and psychoanalysis at the faculty of Saint-Denis and then at the Sorbonne in Paris where she defended a dissertation entitled “the location in painting”. In 2010 she published a work entitled “Ontology of place, journey to the land of non-where” in the aesthetic art collection of Editions l’Harmattan.
Throughout her artistic career, the theme of childhood memories with the figure of the little girl and the theme of the place with the figure of the tree have been dominant. Influenced by Persian poets and philosophers, writing and poetry have always been predominant in the world of Katayoun Rouhi.
Thus she developed in her work the theme of Ut Poesis Pictura confronting her writing with her pictorial practice, notably in a series exhibited with the Galerie Thais at the Grand Palais in 2011.
Simine Paris is a virtual platform that highlights Iranian artists, known or emerging, of all generations, all over the world.
Our ambition is to promote the artists with whom we collaborate, to make their work known and to support them towards a growing presence and visibility on the Parisian and European scene.
To this end, we organize exhibitions in Paris and Europe to present the work of these artists and to allow them to regularly show their new products and recent creations. Our participation in Parisian and European art fairs also allows us to expose these artists to a large audience of art lovers, collectors and buyers from all over the world.
We are particularly keen to be a privileged interlocutor for Iranian artists living and working in Iran, an interface at their disposal to show their work, to make their voice and their artistic point of view heard and to ensure their presence on the scene. Parisian and European artistic.
The bond between the Iranian people and their artists is a strong and deep bond. Throughout history, art and culture, drawing, painting, music, dance, literature and poetry, have influenced and accompanied political and societal movements in Iran. All the impossibilities, prohibitions, restrictions, more or less significant depending on the movements of History and political regimes, have always been countered and annihilated by the strength of Iranian culture which has its roots in a History several thousand years old. In Iran and for the Iranians, art and culture have always been a vector and a weapon of transformation and liberation.
Iran cannot exist without its culture, and art and artists in particular have always been part of History.
