Koorosh Shishegaran
Koorosh Shishegaran is a contemporary Iranian painter, graphic designer and printer. Shishegaran is known for his abstract calligraphic paintings. However, this empiricist artist has tried different mediums during his career. He graduated with a degree in painting from Tehran Conservatory of Fine Arts and studied interior architecture at the Faculty of Decorative Arts.
Shishegaran’s art has contained social and populist aspects from the very first day. He showed this tendency in the way he presented his works in his first professional exhibition, which he held in 1972 in Tehran Mess Gallery. Instead of selling, he donated all of his 42 works to ordinary people and public institutions: "We should take the painting to the people, not to wait for them to come to it." Along with this idea, in 1976, he sent the postcards of his paintings to certain people. His first foreign exhibition was held in Switzerland that year. In this collection, Shishegaran had reconstructed the works of prominent Iranian and world artists such as Mondrian, Modigliani, Picasso, Klee, Vaziri and Alireza Abbasi, using his own technique and method of expression. This experience was a test for Shishegaran to see how "the work of several different painters - with different techniques, styles, philosophies and nationalities" could be brought under one style and one vision. "He took them from one time to another time and reproduced them in different compositions and performances, and somehow made them serve each other."
A year later, in a radical experience, he presented Shahreza Street (the current Enghelab) as a living work of art. Sheshegaran pasted posters across Revolution Street on which he wrote to the passers-by: "Shahreza Street is a painting; Shahreza Street is a statue; "Shahreza Street is architecture, it is graphics, it is cinema, it is theater, it is poetry, it is writing, it is music, it is dance, it is caricature, it is photography." In another radical experiment, Shishegaran, in collaboration with his brothers, made copies and distributed posters with current political and social themes – first on the Arab-Lebanese war and later on in connection with the Revolution of 1978 – throughout the city. Shishegaran continued his search by combining the potentials of photography, painting, and graphics to create a collection called "Photoworkers", which were works that fluctuated on the border between these three mediums and still followed the political and social concerns of the artist.
In his famous abstract paintings, Shishegaran is more committed to painting than to politics and society. Shishegaran's approach towards the coil of lines is reminiscent of the graphic "strokes" on Liechtenstein. These lines are more of a graphic interpretation of this painting element than a painting. In some of the paintings, the confusing coils resulting from the flow of these lines in space evoke the shadow of a corpse or human body, and change from pure abstraction to formation. Pakbaz writes about these works: "Dynamic combinations with curved lines and intertwined ribbons and vivid colors. Although the paintings are deliberately executed, they have a sense of spontaneity. "The graphic nature of the paintings highlights their connection to his posters."
