The work on display is a notable example of a major period of Koorosh Shishegaran’s career, a fairly long period when the artist continually sought to discover the visual capacity of lines on a color background. These interwoven stripes sometimes shape an interlaced figure, a complicated icon, or a totally abstract form. In this work, however, Shishegaran has displayed a dialog – a play of positive and negative spaces. While Shishegaran’s works often consist of numerous stripes of color, he has left out a positive (occupying) space to create a negative (deleted) space, the meaningful presence of which can only be inferred. In fact, it seems that compressed inscriptions have been removed of the painting. While a flood of stripes often shape works of Shishegaran, a vacuum of space – or gradual disintegration of line and resulting negative space – has created this particular work. Such a unique quality distinguishes this painting from his previous work.
Thinking about Shishegaran’s works of this period in retrospect, perhaps the best word to describe the spirit of his work would be “chaos”. In philosophy and world mythology, “chaos” refers to a vast empty universe at the beginning of creation. It sometimes appears as an amorphous jumbled mass in mythology that once filled the universe before it was created; a vacuum, an immensity or chaos of creation. Shishegaran’s paintings, in fact, visualize this chaotic space; a world in disarray that suddenly, in a fleeting moment, gives life to such an artwork.
The presence of Shishegaran in a majority of prestigious auctions of recent years indicates the phenomenal market his works enjoy in the arena of contemporary visual arts. In addition to the Tehran auctions of recent years, his participation in Christie’s Dubai auctions, 2007 to March 2016, as well as Sotheby’s in London and Doha, 2008 to 2011, demonstrates his significance in Iranian contemporary art.