Image 1 of 1
Image 1 of 1
Image 1 of 1
Image 1 of 1
Collagraph
Media Dimensions: 120 x 230 cm
Image Dimensions: 120 x 230 cm
Limited edition of 1
Split your payment over 10 months with OwnArt 0% APR. Your monthly payment for this artwork would be £1,800.00.
Barrangi works in the long shadow of the Persian illustrated manuscript. The vocabulary is familiar to anyone who has spent time with Safavid miniatures or Qajar lithographs: calligraphic ground, framed figures, hybrid animals, decorative borders that behave like architecture. What he does with that vocabulary is contemporary. The script is often invented or illegible, calligraphy treated as image rather than as text. Figures from European tableaux, Edwardian portrait photographs, circus posters and his own family album are dropped into Persian compositional logic. The result is a body of work that reads as both ancient and recently made, and refuses to settle on which. Humor sits close to the surface. Barrangi's mythic creatures, the bird-headed riders, the women in conversation with lions, the patient elephants, are funny before they are solemn. The work draws on Attar of Nishapur's twelfth-century Conference of the Birds, in which thirty birds journey in search of a king and discover they are themselves the thing they are looking for. The reference is structural rather than illustrative. Barrangi is interested in the kind of storytelling that uses animals to talk about people without asking permission. He has described the images as coming from feeling and from homeland, and the calligraphic passages as functioning like poetry inside the picture. The work is autobiographical without being confessional. Migration, disability, childhood, and the texture of memory are the recurring concerns, but they are routed through a cast of invented characters rather than through the artist's own face.
Collagraph
Media Dimensions: 120 x 230 cm
Image Dimensions: 120 x 230 cm
Limited edition of 1
Split your payment over 10 months with OwnArt 0% APR. Your monthly payment for this artwork would be £1,800.00.
Barrangi works in the long shadow of the Persian illustrated manuscript. The vocabulary is familiar to anyone who has spent time with Safavid miniatures or Qajar lithographs: calligraphic ground, framed figures, hybrid animals, decorative borders that behave like architecture. What he does with that vocabulary is contemporary. The script is often invented or illegible, calligraphy treated as image rather than as text. Figures from European tableaux, Edwardian portrait photographs, circus posters and his own family album are dropped into Persian compositional logic. The result is a body of work that reads as both ancient and recently made, and refuses to settle on which. Humor sits close to the surface. Barrangi's mythic creatures, the bird-headed riders, the women in conversation with lions, the patient elephants, are funny before they are solemn. The work draws on Attar of Nishapur's twelfth-century Conference of the Birds, in which thirty birds journey in search of a king and discover they are themselves the thing they are looking for. The reference is structural rather than illustrative. Barrangi is interested in the kind of storytelling that uses animals to talk about people without asking permission. He has described the images as coming from feeling and from homeland, and the calligraphic passages as functioning like poetry inside the picture. The work is autobiographical without being confessional. Migration, disability, childhood, and the texture of memory are the recurring concerns, but they are routed through a cast of invented characters rather than through the artist's own face.
