Shirazeh Houshiary RA (b. 1955)

Since rising to prominence as a sculptor in the 1980s, Shirazeh Houshiary’s practice also encompasses painting, installation, architectural projects and film.

Houshiary investigates the friction between the conscious and unconscious, control and chance, reflecting on the physical and immaterial qualities that shape art and human life. Veils, membranes and mists are leitmotifs in Houshiary’s work that tries to visualise modes of perception.

Houshiary finds succour in the transformation of material: two words, one an affirmation, the other a denial, are pencil-stroked onto canvas so lightly, and clouded over by finely wrought skeins of pigment, that they morph in front of the naked eye. So too, aluminium or glass elliptical brick towers, charged with dynamic tension, appear different from every angle, as if negating their own presence.

Shirazeh Houshiary was born in Shiraz, Iran in 1955 and moved to London in 1974, She studied at Chelsea School of Art 1979 and lives and works in London. She was awarded the title Professor at the London Institute and was short listed for Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery in 1994. She was given Asia Arts Game Changer Award Hong Kong 2018. Recent publications include: Artists and the Rothko Chapel: 50 Years of Inspiration published by Moody Center for the Arts 2020; The slowdown ‘At a Distance’: 100 visionaries at home in a pandemic, published by apartamento and A Thousand Folds published by Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul.

Major Projects and commission include: Rice Public Art, Moody Center for Arts Houston; East Window, St Martin–in–the-Fields London; Sydney Biennale, Australia; Kiev Biennale, Ukraine; Camden Arts Centre, London; Magasin-Centre National d’Art Contemporain Grenoble; Musee Rath, Switzerland; ‘Breath’ Torre di Porta Nuova 55th Venice Biennale; Tate Liverpool; Villa Stuck Munich; Bonnefanten Museum Maastricht; Hochschule Fur Angewandte Kunst Vienna; International Biennale of Contemporary Art Cartagena Colombia; Skulptur Projekte Munster; Sonsbeek, International sculpture exhibition Arnhem; Les Magiciens de la Terre, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Negotiating Rapture, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.