Pooya Aryanpour

Profile:
Pooya Aryanpour is an artist, art instructor, and university lecturer based in Tehran, Iran. While he is best known for his artistic practice and impact on Iran’s contemporary art scene, he is also an innovative interior and studio designer, curator, creative consultant, and a famed national tennis coach and player. One of the pioneering artists of his generation, Pooya has created a large body of artistic work and an extensive discourse and has a wide-ranging influence as an instructor and educator in visual arts.

Artistic Journey:
Pooya Aryanpour started his artistic practice in the mid-1990s, initially focusing on painting. Exploring subject material rooted in the traditions of Iranian culture, symbolism, schools, and styles of narration, storytelling and folklore, Persian calligraphy schools and their impact on artistic traditions, architecture, and painting, his early pieces employed traces of color, abstract forms, and drawing to create mystery and suspense. Developing his practice, ephemeral forms and lines fused to create illusions of familiar shapes and structures, including plants, animals, artificial creations, architectural configurations, and impressions of the human body. Such studies led to his three-dimensional pieces, in which he combined practices in architecture, sculpting, and painting inspired by traditional Iranian ornamentation techniques such as mirror-work (Ayine-Kari), adapted to the artist’s vision using many modern approaches and procedures.

Notable Works:
Using such techniques, these three-dimensional pieces often take the observer beyond their physical boundaries, as they create wide reflections that lead to plays of light, lines, and forms that create a sensory presence, not unlike the sense of mystery found in Aryanpour’s paintings. Pooya’s sculptures and sculptural installations, while rooted in the very traditions and thought processes involved in his drawings and paintings, appear as large recognizable forms that involve the viewer in an interactive and performative act by plotting his drawings into intricate mirror-work and projecting them into the space.