SAMIRA ABBASSY

Press Release

SAMIRA ABBASSY
June 6th – July 6th, 2002

Press Release

Samira Abbassy was born in Ahwaz, Southwestern Iran. Like most people from this region, she is Arabic rather than Persian (the ethnic majority in Iran). In 1967 Samira’s family emigrated to England, where she was educated from primary school onward. She studied painting at Birmingham Polytechnique and Canterbury College of Art in the United Kingdom.

Given her background, it is not surprising that her work is concerned with issues of personal and cultural identity. As an Arabic woman growing up in 1970’s England, her childhood was shaped by a culture painfully coming to terms with a newly multicultural population; at home, the tensions between traditional Arabic family life and the broader Western society around her threw these issues into sharp perspective.

Visually, Samira’s work reflects her cross-cultural heritage in a number of ways. She draws on the visual traditions of both Middle Eastern and Western art in a manner that is neither superficial nor eclectic, but rooted firmly in her belonging to both cultures. On a deeper level, the themes which recur in her work aim toward a mythology and iconography that underlies both, and indeed all, societies. In excavating through layers of often contracdicting cultural identity towards a deeply personal understanding of the issues which concern a person of her specific background, Samira’s work approaches a perspective universal enough to include all of us.

Samira’s career centered on London for most of the 1980’s and 1990’s. She established a successful gallery career there, showing with the Mercury Gallery in Cork Street, The Royal Academy, and numerous other galleries in England and continental Europe. She currently shows at England & Co. Gallery in London. In 1998, she moved to New York, where she has participated in group and two-person shows with several galleries, including a successful two-person show at Joan Prats Gallery in SoHo. This is her first New York solo show.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My work stems equally from sources that current ideology tells us are irreconcilably opposed – the cultures of the Middle East and the West. I hope that my paintings show the fallacy of this presumed division. In my work the two are inextricably intertwined. This same intertwining is a great part of what defines my personal identity, but the ideas of synergy and interdependence are equally true for the two cultures in a broader sense.

I don’t mind whether my work is seen as an exploration of Western mythology from a Middle Eastern perspective, or a filtering of Middle Eastern iconography through Western art practice. For me, both sides of the equation are equally important. The whole could not exist without either parts, it is the complex interplay between the two that creates the work.

Media fascination with the “east – west divide” downplays any common ground between the two cultures. This sort of cultural exclusivity doesn’t work for me. I believe there are universal themes that are equally valid in any society. I appropriate material freely from the visual traditions of either cultures, using one to sharpen the other. I am working to refine a vision which spans both worlds, turning up unexpected insights in either.

The friction between these differing visual languages in my work has a purifying effect, grinding away at the accretions of lazy assumptions which tend to obscure our view of the “other” and revealing the commonality of human experience in any culture. In these paintings, enduring and universal imagery reveals what it is to be human beyond cultural habit.

My painting process is akin to excavation, an unstructured exploration open-ended enough to reveal rather than impose the image and its meaning. Uncovering layers of historical and cultural variations on universal myths (Adam and Eve, Icarus, The Annunciation), these works bypass cultural specificity to reveal essential qualities about human nature and psyche.

By avoiding a linear narrative approach, I am trying to expose the psychic, incorporeal elements underlying myth and story. Fragmentation of the figure into disconnected parts allows a reading of the body through specific qualities or elements, rather than as character within a narrative. Dissecting the represented figure into component parts and physical functions allows each to act specifically as a metaphor for broader human concerns. Homogeneity and mutation, generative power and decay, fragmentation and integration, all resonate on levels both personal and universally human.

Samira Abbassy (c) New York City, June 2002