Iranian Artist Erodes Identity and Pop Culture in Dynamic Exhibit

Coming off of its successful exhibition during the Sundance Film Festival, the Joyce Gordon Gallery will debut the newest body of work from vibrant Iranian artist, Ali Dadgar. The exhibit, Effacements", is an exploration of identity and popular culture through portrait. Effacements" was funded in part by the City of Oaklands Individual Artist Grant.

Oakland, CA (PRWEB) March 5, 2005 -- The Joyce Gordon Gallery is pleased to debut a new body of work by Oakland-based Iranian artist Ali Dadgar. Effacements: an exploration in portrait" a series of portraits on wood and paper, is Dadgars most recent work and this is its premiere exhibition. Opening reception will take place from 5:30 to 8:00 pm on Friday, April 1, 2005. The exhibit will run from April 1 until May 7, 2005. Effacements" was funded in part by the City of Oaklands Individual Artist Grant.

Ali Dadgar was born in Tehran, Iran in 1962 and immigrated to the U.S. in 1977. He studied art at the California College of the Arts in Oakland where he continues to live and work. Recognized for creating a unique combination of beautiful, dark and capricious paintings, Dadgar has widely exhibited locally and nationally. Effacements" is both an extension of and departure from his previous work.

Using popular culture, photographs, and signature images in these paintings, Dadgar explores a range of experiences and associations in the appearance of the portrait. Dadgar questions the portrait in part by confronting the surface of the image: the paintings experiment with the wood surface by effacing, printing and building thick layers of paint. In contrast, the smaller works on paper, inspired exclusively from photographs, are extremely simple and almost ghostlike in their appearance.

Dadgars last project Recent Antiquities" (2003), a series of paintings on wood and canvas, wrestles with history and tradition; drawing from Pre-Islamic and Islamic Iranian art and design, American Modernism and popular culture, these paintings animate unpredictable dialogues between past and present, East and West. Whereas in Recent Antiquities" the main subject matter was the experience of displacement through the prism of exile, war, social conflict and cultural dissonance, Effacements" turns from external conflict towards more internalized structures of identification by exploring the genre of the portrait and its relation to identity.

About The Joyce Gordon Gallery
Joyce Gordon Gallery, located in Oakland, California, reflects the social and cultural diversity of Bay Area and international artists. The aim of the gallery is to respect and promote the creative pursuit of the individual.

For further information, please contact Joyce Gordon at 510-465-8928 or 510-465-8998. Joyce Gordon Gallery is located at 406 14th St., Oakland, Calif.

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