For the first exhibition of the year, L’Atlas invites the iranian-londoner gallery Ab-Anbar for two successive exhibitions. The second one, The eternal inner reconstruction, will be a solo show of the iranian artist Baktash Sarang.
After his multidisciplinary projects which focused on the phenomenology of space and place, seeking for a more precise meaning to the word « limitation », Baktash Sarang works on the design and construction of architectural structures close to the human body, as well as relationships between the individual, his own body and bodily boundaries, inspired by philosophical and political theories from Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault.
Baktash Sarang (Tehran – 1981), lives and works between Paris and Tehran. He is an interdisciplinary artist who creates work about the human body and its connection to its surroundings and habitat. He makes use of diverse mediums including drawing, architecture, sculpture and most recently installation and model-making.
Sarang trained in fine arts at IRIB art school, before going on to receive his BA degree in visual arts from Azad University of Art and Architecture in 2005. After graduation, he moved to France, where he undertook a course in Metal sculpture at Haute Écoles des Arts du Rhin, HEAR in Strasbourg (2012). He was selected as artist in residence at Académie des Beaux Arts, Institut de France, Fondation Dufraine, before going on to study at Université Paris 1, pantheon-Sorbonne, Paris, France, where he was awarded his MA in 2015.
In recent years, alongside drawings, he has been working on installation projects with links to architectural issues. For his MA thesis, Tower of Silence (Tower of Babel), Sarang examined the fall of utopian projects, taking inspiration from historical Iranian towers and the relationship of the human body to architectural spaces to create his sculptures. Sarang has held several solo exhibitions and participated in multiple group exhibitions and biennales, including the International Architecture Biennale di Venezia (2018).
About Ab-Anbar
In Persian, ab means « water » and anbar « reservoir ». This is how the contemporary art gallery Ab-Anbar, opened in Tehran in 2014, defines itself : as the architectural expression of a physical space which hosts a malleable and life-essential content. Involved in the crossed-stories of art and history, it represents worldwide artists, whose work overcomes esthetical, political, social and psychological borders. Since 2020, Ab-Anbar is settled in London, with a new space opened in September 2023 in the historical neighbourhood of Fitzrovia. Its ambition is to support dialogue between artists, collecters, museums and curators, toward inclusion and understanding of marginalised realities.