Enter Art Fair
Maryam Amiryani / George Bolster
August 27–30, 2020
Tunnelfabrikken, Oceanvej 1, 2150 Nordhavn, Copenhagen, Denmark
Booth 47
Left: George Bolster, The Human to Human Flaw, 2020. 18 x 15 inches / 45.7 x 38.1 cm, Jacquard tapestry and embroidery.
Right: Maryam Amiryani, Gonzo 1, 2019. 7 1⁄2 x 4 3⁄4 inches / 19.1 x 12.1 cm, Oil on linen over wood.
For Enter Art Fair, Ulterior is pleased to present works by two artists: Marfa, Texas-based Iranian American painter Maryam Amiryani and New York-based Irish multimedia artist George Bolster.
Maryam Amiryani’s work follows the tradition of still-life paintings. She depicts various objects—such as figurines of TV characters, a book cover of feminist history, and photographs of ‘60s and ‘70s movie stars—on small linen panels, scaled to the original object. Amiryani’s still lifes become portraits of their subjects, but always at a remove, as they are representations of representations, frozen in a moment of time. Almost all of Amiryani’s subjects are familiar to most everyone whocame of age in a certain period in the West, but for Amiryani, who needed to leave Iran upon the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and saw her way of life change abruptly, these were the icons that she was suddenly introduced to and adopted as she was growing up in the West, far from her native culture. Born of this double or exile’s point of view, her portraits are animated by a wry and probing mix of affection and detachment.
George Bolster has been working on ideas of how art can be sustained and conserved in light of climate change. He has made propositions for art museums in outer space—perhaps that’s the last place art should be—and through his work he questions how we can avoid this fate. His recent groups of works originated from his long-time research and dialogue with SETI (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute) and at NASA’s Ames Research Center. By utilizing a combination of tapestry and the technique called decortiqué, Bolster tries to visualize the planets and celestial entities that we usually cannot see by stripping threads from the tapestry and repurposing the removed material to embroider new astral bodies into the images. Bolster’s tapestries juxtapose seemingly disparate realities; making visible planets we can’t see with the naked eye, his works challenge our views of normalcy, including distinctions based on limit, boundary, tradition, and race.
Artists Bios:
Maryam Amiryani was born in Shiraz, Iran in 1967. Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Amiryani and her family relocated to Paris, France. Several years later, she moved to the United States, where she completed her education, obtaining a MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art, New York, NY, in 1995. Amiryani has had two solo exhibitions with Ulterior Gallery, and this is the first time her work has been introduced in Denmark.
George Bolster was born in Cork in 1972, and is now based in New York, NY. His solo exhibition at Solstice Arts Center in Navan, Ireland, You Are Made of Stardust, is currently on view until August 28, 2020. Bolster’s first solo exhibition at Ulterior Gallery is scheduled to take place this November.
Other recent solo exhibitions include: Tatooine: Sci-Fi Becoming Fact, Sirius Arts Centre, Cork, Ireland (2019); Towards a Universal Sublime, Bratislava, Slovakia (2018); Amazement Insulates Us All, Memento Vivere, The Lab, Dublin, Ireland (2015); Un/natural History: Drowning Captiva, Nuit Blanche, Toronto, Canada (2014); sociodesic: a space for the three great loves, Galway Art Centre (2010); and High on Christ, Chung King Projects, Los Angeles, California, USA (2009). Bolster is the recipient of numerous awards including Irish Arts Council, Culture Ireland, and the Arts Council of England, Rauschenberg Foundation Residency Fellowship, and more.
Enter Art Fair Website: www.enterartfair.com
