RISEN FROM THE ASHES

AN ARTISTIC ODYSSEY OF REBIRTH BY

YARI OSTOVANY

Blue Rhino is proud to announce RISEN FROM THE ASHES: AN ARTISTIC ODYSSEY OF REBIRTH featuring the work of Iranian-born, San Francisco-based artist Yari Ostovany. This solo exhibition presents a self-reflective view of the acclaimed artist’s body of work; spanning over twenty years to showcase a lifetime of navigation between two cultures.

Yari Ostovany’s paintings probe into the spiritual journey of formation and transformation. The thoughtful abstraction which characterises the artist’s work captures the nomadic in-between; giving way to an ephemeral sense of form and visual phenomena dealing with an interiority as opposed to an exterior reality.Informed by his own experience of movement, Ostovany draws inspirations from both Western and Iranian. The artist employs mark-making techniques inspired by calligraphy, Taoist aesthetic sensibilities, and alchemy in his interpretation of Abstract Expressionism.

The artist connects with gravity of the earth to push and move paint, until the distinctions between the foreground and the background and all other spatial hierarchy melt away. The effect of his paintings is described by the artist as musical, architectural, and Zen. Ostovany describes his artistic practise as an archiving process having to do with psychic geology akin to layers of memory. Inducing both artist and viewer into a liminal state where solid forms are dissolved as the layers explode and implode, are added, and rubbed out, re-applied, sourced into, and scraped away.

Ostovany’s work is remarkable in the way that it teeters between various dichotomies. The surface of his painting reveals a poetic balance between primordial contradictions, encompassing stasis and movement. Emergence and disappearance.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in Iran in 1962, Yari Ostovany moved to the United States at the age of 16 and pursued his initial studies in art at the University of Nevada, Reno. He then went on to the San Francisco Art institute, where he received his MFA in 1995. Ostovany has exhibited extensively in the US and internationally, and is the recipient of the Sierra Arts Endowment Grant, Craig Sheppard Memorial Grant and Sierra Nevada Arts Foundation Grant. Yari Ostovany currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.