dideh: Koorosh Shishegaran: biography

Koorosh Shishehgaran was born in Ghazvin in 1945. He started drawing and painting in high school and later entered the College of Decorative Arts in Tehran, where he studied interior design, graduating in 1973.

Shishehgaran experienced several different artistic stages before arriving at his current painting style. In 1972 and ’73, he made copies of his paintings, believing that art must address the general public and works of art should, accordingly, be put in places where the public can readily see them. He then copied some of the world’s famous masterpieces, and later took up publishing posters and "art by post," by means of which he sent his works to social, political and cultural institutions and to prominent figures both in Iran and around the world. From 1977 on, he adopted a functional approach to art, making objects such as lamps, chairs and bookshelves while continuing to produce posters with sociopolitical themes (not by order of anyone), which he would put up on downtown walls. In his search for wider artistic experience, he also began taking photographs.

Shishehgaran’s long period of experimentation has led to his current simple and unpretentious style of visual art, through which instances of confusion, rush, complexity and excitement in everyday life are depicted without recourse to literary or narrative references. Describing Shishehgaran’s views as manifested in his works of art, writer and poet Javad Mojabbi writes that he conceives the modern world as being dynamic, complex, ever-changing and on the verge of explosion. To express his mental picture of modern life, Shishehgaran uses lines with explosive, energetic twists in a natural and playful rather than an intentional manner, characterized by a touch of appealing euphoria.

Shishehgaran’s paintings could be said to bridge the gap between music and architecture, though they are neither subordinate to nor of the same nature as architecture and music. Colored lines (often black, red and blue) twist and curve rapidly and elatedly against a mild background, creating a perplexing tangle that, like a piece of electronic music, can be interpreted in a variety of ways: they swerve artistically within the broad boundaries of wholeness and nothingness while expressing and not expressing and constructing and not constructing certain things. This maze of lines can represent the life, sense and mentality of a curious soul or merely the subconscious movement of the artist’s hand on canvas. They might be creative abstractions or the image of a person whose external contour has been pruned repeatedly, so that only his or her innermost core--the ultimate truth of his or her human soul--may be visualized. Or perhaps they represent the patterns on tiles or carpets, or clouds moving along in one direction. Yet again, they may be pieces of Persian calligraphy that have gone beyond the conventional domain of writing. Shishehgaran’s paintings represent a nature that has undergone the heated stages of the modern arts and eventually reached its abstract essence.

Ali Asghar Gharebaghi

One-man exhibitions:

Group exhibitions:

Award:

1998, Tehran, Iran, Painting Millenium Exhibition, Niavaran Cultural House