Exhibition in CAP KUwait Undiscovered Minimalism

Del 18 al 26 de  Noviembre nueva exhibición en CAP, la galería de arte que esta en Shuweich en la parte mas industrial. En esta ocasión se trata de una exposicón de alfombras persas.

“I can’t stop pointing to the beauty. Every moment and place says : put this design in your carpet” Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi

The kilims presented here today, come from the various regions in the Mazandaran province. This culturally rich Persian province is located between the Caspian Sea and the Alborz

mountains. While on a visit to the region with my friend Werner Weber in early 2000, we stumbled on an initial specimen of these kilims. Further research took us to the dowry trunks of the women of these villages where treasures were hidden, waiting to see the daylight again.

These kilims seemed to have suddenly landed on earth, without any past trail. But we had some hints of their existence: 14thcentury Persian miniatures depicted heroes, princes and

lovers resting on striped colorful kilims. Photographs of interiors of the 19thcentury Qajar palaces showed a tradition of honoring a guest by covering the carpet where he is supposed

to sit with a precious “rufarshi” (in Persian carpet cover). These rufarshis were finely woven textiles, usually with stripes, and in a limited color range.

Some of these kilims were quickly placed in various collections around the world, while the rest was put aside in view of a major publication. This exhibition and the book accompanying

is the culmination of this joint e ort. The book is written by Parviz Tanavoli, the world renowned Iranian artist and carpet collector, and includes a contribution from Heinz Meyer,

specialist in the aesthetics of textile art.

The patterns and colors of these flatweaves have an uncanny resemblance to Minimalism, an

artistic movement in Western paintings in the 1950’s. Any artistic resemblance between these

Iranian flatweaves and Western art is completely coincidental. While the Minimalist movement has deep roots in Western civilization ,Tanavoli asserts, in his book, that the designs found in these kilims from Mazandaran, have their roots in Persian Sufism. Nevertheless, it is interesting that Persian women in their remote villages could produce textile art reminiscent of works by major Western artists of the 20th century such as Mark

Rothko, Gerhard Richter ,Sean Scully…

While we are still in the early stages of our discovery, this elusive group of weavings has opened our eyes to look at Persian flatweaves from a completely new perspective. In this

exhibition, we encourage the visitor not only to tune into the secret language of tribal woven art, but also to think outside the domain of ethnography, in an attempt to capture the

underlying elements that connect “textile art” to simply “ Art”.