For his very first solo exhibition in France entitled “Fields of Reflections” and presented by Superzoom, the artist Desire Moheb-Zandi presents a series of tapestries that invite us to travel between materials and dreams, from Brazil to Turkey, through California. His works harmoniously combine these materials and the weaving thread to form landscapes that oscillate between abstraction and obviousness.
Desire Moheb-Zandi observes, analyzes and collects the materials that surround her, recomposing the world according to her inspirations : she assembles industrial plastic from New York to neon tubes picked up in Pontal de Maceio, Brazil, cotton threads found in Turkey to wicking wool from a farm in the Hudson Valley. Guided by the thread and her intuition, Desire Moheb-Zandi then embarks fully into the composition of her work, without sketches or preparatory work. She assembles these various pieces of material from all over the world to form a composite palette of formal and chromatic explorations.
This direct manufacture of the tapestry with the wire of the forms and the reasons places Desire Moheb-Zandi in the lineage of the weavers, the majority non-western, who did not use conventional writings to compose the textile pieces, but rather symbols making it possible to transmit their ideas. In order to understand the approach of this cosmopolitan artist, one must go back to her origins. Desire Moheb-Zandi was born in Berlin and grew up in Turkey, the country of birth of part of her family, as a granddaughter of Uzbeks. Her grandmother, who served as an apprenticeship manual, passed on to her the ancestral know-how of a textile culture that is still very much alive today, thanks to craftsmen and artists who have taken up the torch of this traditional activity. At a very young age, she left Turkey to settle in New York and joined the Parsons School of Design before discovering California, Brazil, and now France where she lives and works to the rhythm of her loom. Desire Moheb-Zandi has built her language by drawing from the diversity of her roots and travels, from the influence of artists she admires – Sheila Hicks, Erin Riley, Gunta Stölzl, Terri Friedman – as well as from Persian poems, the carpet fields of the Antalya region or the Kilia idols, Turkish statuettes dating from the Bronze Age.
The weaving artist is guided by his thread, and the networks formed by it create infinite possibilities and multiple narratives. Charged with the history of textile art, the thread becomes the symbol of the transmission of a thousand-year-old know-how. Going beyond the traditional boundaries of weaving, Desire Moheb-Zandi gives herself to her art by committing herself to a free and inventive path, through the use and exploration of new and personal materials and techniques.
Assemblages of intertwined threads and links, her works connect collective and individual lives that intersect in complex arrangements, breaking the boundaries between feminine and masculine, natural and industrial, ancient and contemporary, strength and serenity. “My works are like an extension of myself, they emanate and provoke strong emotions that visitors seize to reinterpret them in their own way,” she confides, inviting the viewer to delicately touch her works during the visit. A generous and precious invitation, at a time when touching becomes a dreaded act.
Superzoom presents “Fields of Reflections” by Desire Moheb-Zandi
From January 30th to February 28th
21, rue Chapon, Paris 3rd
