Mehdi Saeedi - Black & Red & White

20 January 2009
18:00 - 20:00

Xerxes Fine Arts with the promotional support of Iran Heritage Foundation

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Mehdi Saeedi is an internationally renowned artist and designer. His aesthetics have become a mainstay of design in many regions, especially in those using the Arabic and Iranian scripts as their alphabet.

Born in Tehran, Iran in 1974, Saeedi was educated and trained at Tehran's Malekeh Ashtar school of graphic design, at Tehran University's Faculty of Fine Arts and at the University of Cambridge.

Mehdi Saeedi is emblematic of Iran's prominence and regional dominance in photography, graphic design and poster art. Iran's political dynamism and wholesale social changes throughout the late 1970s and the 1980s, her role as an ideological source since 1979 and her national psyche and propaganda art during the Iran - Iraq war have all helped Iran and her artists to acquire a focus, and then a forte, in those media. The new Iran's maturity and post war peace and prosperity have only highlighted these strengths.

Saeedi is far from being just a calligrapher. He draws upon the traditional Eastern focus on the aesthetic, and from his own expertise with the Arabic and Iranian scripts, to establish a new conceptual and modernist approach to the aesthetics of the calligraphic script in contemporary art -- letters are manipulated and words abstracted to provide optical illusion of all sorts.

While earlier futurists such as Giacomo Balla, Victor Vasarley and Bridget Riley manipulated the geometry of form and space, Saeedi uses the amenable Arabic and Iranian scripts to induce the notions of movement, speed, velocity, space and colour.

Mehdi Saeedi has used the optical opportunities presented by the dancing and sensual nature of the Arabic script to establish his own conceptual approach to contemporary art.
© Xerxes Fine Arts

21 January - 21 February 2009
Tuesday-Friday 10:00 - 18:00
Saturdays 11:00 - 16:00

Admission free