Artists

Behrang Karimi

Press release

Avlskarl Gallery is proud to present Nocturnes, Behrang Karimi’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

“What is beauty, you ask, and that’s a good question.” says Behrang Karimi.  “For me, beauty is both destruction and creation. Beauty lies in the balance.”

Behrang Karimi’s paintings appear as moments frozen in time. They are enigmatic, not immediately legible, and alternate between figuration and the smoldering abstract. They are tactile, sensuous universes that point to painting as a medium as much as to philosophical and personal issues related to memory, literature, and history.

For Karimi, painting is a stage on which motifs from different spheres can encounter, where free associations, cognitive experiments, and mental images from literature, philosophy, and mythology drive the work forward. The work has undergone a process of detachment, away from its starting point in the concrete and into a painterly universe where color, composition and balance constitute the main components.

In the work Begegnung, Karimi takes as his point of departure a photograph in which a group of seated and reclining people lean towards each other. In Karimi’s representation, the bodies are naked, they appear vulnerable against the open, dark background. The title points to an interaction, perhaps a chance meeting between strangers, which has suddenly developed into something more. Where the original photograph showed a scene from a war, Karimi’s work is ambiguous: Are we seeing wounded bodies protecting and saving each other, or are we rather in the relaxed company of a group bathing at a spring?

Behrang Karimi was born in Iran and raised in Germany and his personal history, strung out between the Middle East and Europe, does not deny itself in his works. They play with art historical references to the masters of Renaissance painting, who united the history of Western art and culture with the geographical places from which Karimi originates. But unlike his painterly predecessors, Karimi’s works withdraw from the narrative and into an indeterminate world, frozen in time. They remind us of the many fractures and transitions of history, of standing on the threshold of something unknown and of how different worlds can suddenly merge.

Through his intuitive understanding of the possibilities of painterly space, Karimi makes room for the unknown, the foreign, as it can manifest itself in the midst of the daily routine. For the beauty that is ambiguous, perhaps, that balances on the border between destruction and creation.

Behrang Karimi (b. 1980, Shiraz, Iran) graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2015. He has most recently had solo exhibitions at Ermes Ermes, Rome (2024), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westphalia, Düsseldorf (2024), Melas Martinos, Athens (2023) and Maureen Paley, London (2023). Karimi lives and works in Cologne.