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Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi is an Iranian American artist whose creative practice is a navigation of her multifaceted experiences as an immigrant. Ilchi’s paintings provide a space where her two disparate histories come together to reflect on cultural traditions and notions of belonging.
In her recent explorations, Ilchi expands upon her previous influences of Persian art and American Abstraction by engaging with traditions of Western landscape painting and ideas of the Sublime.
For Ilchi, each painting is activated through unpredictability and chance as fluid layers of poured paint form a crucial foundation for space and image building. The layering of poured paint results in complex and unanticipated shapes, colors and surface textures that simultaneously embody conflicting dualities, such as delicacy and crudeness, depth and flatness, transparency and opacity, abstraction and representation, and beauty and repulsion. These pours are then interlaced with intricately painted patterns and imagery derived from personal and found sources, Persian painting and illuminated manuscripts, and 19th century European and American landscape paintings.
The resulting paintings merge conflicting elements into sublime landscapes that tread the fine line between equilibrium and chaos as well as between nostalgia and a sense of estrangement. They become portals to otherworldly and unsettled environments, simulating terrestrial and extraterrestrial vistas on the brink of cataclysmic rupture.
In these hybridized paintings, Ilchi examines how the confluence of the disparate metaphorical languages of abstraction, ornamentation and the Sublime can reflect the harmonies and tensions caused by the meeting of different cultures and traditions, on a personal, sociopolitical and environmental scale.
Read Mark Jenkin's review in DisCerning Eye.
Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi was born in Tehran, Iran and currently lives and works in the Washington, D.C. area. She received an MFA in studio art from American University and a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art + Design.
Ilchi is the recipient of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellowship, the Zeta Orionis Painting Fellowship, the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Painting, and the Bethesda Painting Award. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally. Her work has been featured in publications including The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Art Papers, Washington City Paper, and New American Paintings.
Ilchi has been an artist-in-residence at the Ucross Foundation, Millay Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Playa Summer Lake, Monson Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Her work is included in private and public collections such as The Phillips Collection, the Federal Reserve Board, the Microsoft Art Collection, and the Carl M. Freeman Foundation. She is represented by Hemphill Artworks in Washington, D.C.
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