SHIRAZEH HOUSHIARY

Born in Iran in 1955, Houshiary moved to England in 1974 and was quickly established as a leading figure in a new generation of sculptors working in Britain in the 1980s. With the growth in the scale and breadth of her sculptural practice came the necessity for the support of specialist fabricators to realise larger-scale pieces. Reflecting on this, Houshiary noted an increased detachment from the origins of her three-dimensional works: the processes of working on paper and canvas. Attempts to regain an intimacy with her working methods led to the conceptual premise that would steer her entire practice; notably the visualisation of the breath. Houshiary says: “What is intimate and near to us? It is our breath... and breath is life and if you don’t breathe you are no more. This seems simple but it is profound. We are present because we breathe. Sometimes simple ideas escape us and we lose the foundation of our existence.”

Spanning four decades, each of the works in Houshiary’s Studio presentation can trace their origins to a 1981 work, titled Fire Stolen by Bird. Comprising sculptural elements made from sand and wood covered in earth and wax, the artist torched the works to char them, and eventually the entire piece was destroyed. She says: “I’ve been fascinated by the human urge to know the secret of fire, even if the cost may be our own destruction”. This profound curiosity in the forces that compel humanity’s search for meaning, extending to an exploration of the nature of perception, imagination and the very essence of existence, is the impetus of Houshiary’s practice in all its forms. The archival materials included in the presentation, shown alongside objects and references from her studio, present as a form of visual poetry, weaving through time, context and discipline to reveal her expansive conceptual framework.

The earliest work on display is a large-scale drawing created in 1990: depicting an elemental, binary form set against a black ground, it has startling affinities to her most recent paintings in its evocation of a visual landscape that is at once cellular and cosmic in quality.

The journey through painting begins with a work created in 2003, Outside In, which makes manifest the boundary that Houshiary’s work has continually sought to inhabit, investigate and extrude. A luminous seam of deeply rigorous pencilwork, penetrating the canvas like a vibrating skein, divides the canvas as horizon separates earth and sky. As with every painting that Houshiary has created over the course of her career, this work is formed from text – two words in Arabic, “I am”, and “I am not” – superimposed onto one another repeatedly so as to create a new word that both abstracts and encompasses the affirmation and denial.

Produced twenty years after Outside In but sharing deep connections to it, The Hours (2023) combines Houshiary’s inscriptions with layers of sediment formed by pouring water mixed with pure pigment. This work and three further new paintings produced specially for this presentation – Cradle, Rite of Passage, and Dew (all 2024) – demonstrate Houshiary’s ability to use pigment to conjure different material states: swathes of colour appear variously as vapour, earth, smoke and matter.

Sculpture provides the final dimension of this this partial survey of Houshiary’s work, in which she forgoes a focus on chronology for a conceptual and narrative approach that highlights points of connection between new and historical works. This approach is exemplified in the wall sculpture Time Curve (2024), in which Houshiary visualises time not as linear or cyclical but an all-encompassing generative present, and in the piece Just So (2022), which rises from the ground as two intertwining forms separated by a curve of space, demonstrating the sublime connectivity of opposition in dialogue.

Shown here: Shirazeh Houshiary, Rite of Passage, 2024, Pigment and pencil on Aquacryl on canvas and aluminium, 190 x 190 cm, 74 3/4 x 74 3/4 in © Shirazeh Houshiary, courtesy Lisson Gallery