Montoro12 Contemporary Art is proud to present the first solo exhibition in Italy of Azerbaijani artist Faig Ahmed (b. 1982, Baku). The artist will show a new series of his “carpet works”, in which he takes traditional Azerbaijani carpet designs as a starting point to transform them into powerful contemporary works of art. Known in Italy for his participation in the Venice Biennale (2007 and 2013), the artist has exhibited his work in all the major international art capitals – New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Dubai, Moscow, and Hong Kong, to name just a few.
In 2007 Faig Ahmed started a series of works that deconstruct the traditional patterns and designs of the hand-woven Middle Eastern carpet – the symbol of his local tradition – transforming it into a striking visual feat. Looking at “Oiling” for example, we see a traditional Azerbaijani carpet, which, halfway down, mutates into a cascade of seemingly liquid color – as if the carpet’s threads had metamorphosed into streams of multicolor paint. A compelling visual illusion: like the top half, the lower part is still a wool carpet made with natural colors.
Faig Ahmed’s working method is conceptual: he designs the wall carpets in digital form on the computer and then enlarges them into “cartoons” the size of the finished works. Like with traditional tapestries, these life-size paper drawings are then used by local craftspeople hand weaving the carpets on traditional looms. In some ways Ahmed’s working method recalls the production of Alighiero Boetti’s tapestries, which were designed by the artist, but hand-sewn by craftspeople in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As if to capture the rapid evolution and development of his country, Azerbaijan, Ahmed translates a centuries old tradition into contemporary digital forms and designs. In “Invert” for example, we get a sense of the “inside out, back in front”: a part of the carpet is shown in its traditional colors, while the rest seems to be the much lighter colored “back” or reverse.
Many of Ahmed’s “carpet works” can be described as trompe l’oeils, depicting an illusion of three-dimensionality on a flat surface. “Just Emptiness” recalls a sculptural or architectural trompe l’oeil, such as Borromini’s masterpiece of perspective optical illusion in the courtyard of the historical Palazzo Spada, just a few minutes from Montoro12 Contemporary Art. While Borromini’s optical illusion is created by ever shrinking columns, in Ahmed’s “Just Emptiness” a square carpet frame diminishes into a succession of ever smaller and darker frames to an almost black center of great visual depth – however, the perspective illusion is threaded into a flat carpet hanging on the wall. It is a tongue in cheek allusion to numerous modern works of art depicting “nothingness” – a frame made of traditional carpet fabric encloses more frames, but no image, “Just Emptiness”.
As Caroline Busta notes in her artforum review (October 2013) of Faig Ahmed’s works: “There is a postcolonial tendency to deny non-western cultural producers the agency to employ irony and empty signifiers and to misread codes, but Ahmed has utilized these operations to great effect.”
Born in Azerbaijan in 1982, Faig Ahmed lives and works in Baku. Specializing in sculpture, he graduated from the Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Art in 2004 and has since worked in a great variety of media, including painting, video and installations. He has been shortlisted for the Jameel Prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2013 and has exhibited his work in important venues around the world: The National Center of Contemporary Art in Moscow, the Museum voor Moderne Kunst in Arnheim, Netherlands, the Azerbaijan Cultural Center in Paris, the Islamic Art Festival in Sharjah, UAE, the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau in Dresden, Germany, the Louise Blouin Foundation in London and many others.
Faig Ahmed / Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit
Until 24 April 2015 @ Montoro12 Contemporary Art, Via di Montoro 12, 00186 Rome, Italy