A collaboration between Assar and Bavan galleries, Absence is the first exhibition of a series to be held at various praised associate galleries during Assar’s provisional state of relocating.
In his second solo show with Assar, Pooya Razi exhibits his most recent paintings created in the past nine months, after he decided not to exhibit Street, the collection on which he had worked for two years since 2020 to be exhibited in November 2022 at Assar Art Gallery before the recent upheavals in Iran.
Conceptually and technically, Absence organically stemmed from the Street series where the artist had tried to tackle his lifelong topic of interest, the relationship between light and shadow through his compositions portraying the people on the streets. During his strolls on the busy streets of downtown Tehran and photographing the people for that purpose, Razi’s attention was also drawn to the locked shutters of the shops, signifying the abandoned and desolated spirit of the city as an aftermath of the socio-political unrest. Razi, whose Street series also included a number of smaller paintings of closed shutters, decided to focus on the notion of non-existence or absence, a concept he had socially, intellectually and personally dealt with for a while through the imagery of closed shops and locked shutters.