Iranian artist Mehrdad Sadri’s sensuous paintings of fabrics and other forms are coming to Hong Kong’s Galerie Huit in a new retrospective on the past decade of his work.“Images of Reality,” running at Galerie Htui May 12 to June 24, features Sadri’s haunting abstract and semi-figurative paintings. On his website, Sadri explains his working process. His work, he writes, is “inspired by ... subjective needs: the world of dreams, wishes, and desires.”The result of this inspiration is a body of work at once sensual, seductive, and sinisterly surreal.In works like “Called Trotzdem,” 2006, Sadri plays with visual double entendre, trading in the coded language of eroticism. In this painting, a pair of hands grasps a set of railings, flowing fabric all around. With no context, the viewer is left to wonder whether she is seeing an erotic image—fists clenched in ecstasy around the rails of a bed—or a darker scene of a prisoner rattling the bars of his cage.While other images in the exhibition make similar use of disembodied body parts, often seen in voyeuristic glimpses, much of Sadri’s work is abstract.“The paintings invoke open interpretation,” Galerie Huit stated in a press release. They “transcend specific representation.”Visitors to the show will enjoy these surreal abstractions. They will also appreciate Sadri’s journey from Tehran to Vienna, and the influence of the architecture of the Austrian capital on his work. Now, the strange, sexual Baroque dream images find themselves in the new context of the steel and glass of Hong Kong.“Images of Reality” runs May 12-June 24 at Galerie Huit in Hong Kong.
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