Kiarash Khazaei

BIOGRAPHY
(Born in Tehran, Iran) currently lives & works between Cambridge and Paris. He graduated from the Städelschule, Frankfurt, Germany (2015-2019) under Professor Amy Sillman and Professor Monika Baer.

Kiarash Khazaei’s paintings depict a choreographed array of artefacts, accessories and architectural elements that point to the idea of identity and meaning as being collage-like in their construction. Permeated by an aura of eroticism and decadence, and loaded with codes and double-meanings, the works further point to the intricacies of self-identity, while celebrating moments of transformation.

There are literary precursors at play, in particular the decadent writings of Georges Bataille and Jean Genet, evoking both the pleasures and the limits of a queer vocabulary which, often thought of as demarcating a space of resistance through the awareness of double meanings and the construction of codes, is unlocked by Khazaei to welcome major motifs from the art historical canon.

The construction of identity and dispersal of meaning are rendered thematically and pictorially fraught, figures engage in rituals of courtship, sex and death that seem to be based on a theatrical exaggeration of emotions, his colours edging towards over-ripe or chemical hues reinforcing the notion of transfiguration or intoxication.