Shirana Shahbazi

In a New York Times review, Roberta Smith wrote that Shirana Shahbazi “treats her photographs like words that can be used in different sentences or translated into entirely different languages.” Shahbazi--who won the London Citibank Prize in 2002 and participated in the 2005 Venice Biennale--was born in Tehran in 1974, moved to Germany as a child and is currently based in Zurich. Her work reflects the references she has absorbed from both Iranian and European cultures. Trained as a photographer, Shahbazi shoots eclectically--portraits, still lifes, landscapes. These photographs are then often used as source material for paintings, billboards and traditional Iranian carpets. By altering the scale of the photographs, transposing the imagery into a new medium and blending cultures, she subverts viewers' expectations about the relationship between an artist's identity and her work. Lavishly illustrated, this monograph includes essays by Kate Bush, Ali Subotnick and Gianni Jetzer.

Shirana Shahbazi frequented the Conference and Education Center of a Swiss Re Insurance building over a period of 12 months. The resulting montage of photography and classical painting genres cultivates an associative trip through portrait, landscape, still life and history painting. What emerges depends partly on your eye's liability.