Aida Mahmudova: Non-Imagined Perspectives

Aida Mahmudova: Non-Imagined Perspectives
01.04.2018 - 10.06.2018

YARAT Contemporary Art Space, a not-for-profit non-governmental contemporary art organisation in Baku, presents a solo exhibition of new works by Azerbaijani artist and founder of YARAT, Aida Mahmudova.

This exhibition is curated by Suad Garayeva-Maleki.

Across the top floor of the exhibition space, the artist has produced an entirely new body of work that builds on her exploration of material as a tool for experimentation. For the artist the process of destruction and re-creation, of building layers and tearing them apart, of mixing various materials, such as paper, clay, cement, stone and, for the first time in this show marble, becomes an exercise for material growth and emotional healing. The total installation of sculptures, resembling crumbling pillars, and monumental wall works create a feeling of a transient place, half ruined and half built, and one is reminded that entropy is an essential step of creation. For Mahmudova the process is everything and her textured works act as tokens of memory, each layer exposing a particular moment on the artist’s personal time-space continuum.

Early on in her work, Mahmudova developed a curiosity towards material, which manifested itself through experimentation with light, color and matter in her landscapes and semi-abstract canvases. As her paintings became increasingly more layered the artist expanded her practice into the three dimensional, applying the same approach to sculpture and creating environments both emotive and intense. Harmonious with the physical nature of her chosen materials and her preferred earthly palette, her deeply intuitive explorations continue to evolve across the spectrum of universal human sentiments of love, loss, memory and desire. In the artist’s own words, “this artistic process is in a way an act of tearing away at our fundamental principles, which are manmade and therefore ultimately fragile.”