Bijan Amini-Alavijeh: A Glimmer

Bijan Amini-Alavijeh’s practice is informed by Medieval English and Persian art and architecture, referencing both cultures’ understanding of sacred geometries and their extensive lexicons of decoration. His investigation into their motifs, patterns and abstract decoration uncovers a commonality of the same shape – a circle, a spiritual shape offering unity, wholeness, and perfection. This familiarity with their complexity offers the artist the opportunity to create sculpture and drawing that explores repetitive and intuitive making and experimental processes. His works incorporate figurative and abstracted forms, that rejects the hierarchy of materials and processes to explores how we might reshape our understanding of abstraction, tradition and ornamentation. He invites audiences to rethink how we consider spirituality, mortality and our relationship with nature and geometry in the 21st century.

This project presents an extraordinary exhibition of Amini-Alavijeh’s most ambitious sculptures to date. Made using less expensive, accessible materials, such as paper, plaster, wire and wood, to contrast with the durability and opulence of his references and provide invaluable insights into making beautiful and high-quality sculptures without using expensive traditional materials. The work will present a common form realised through different materials, techniques, and processes to explore ideas of delicacy, harmony, spirituality, beauty, movement and decoration. His brutal and defensive sculptural forms will be presented alongside multi-sensory elements that move through interaction of passing audiences. The use of light and casting shadows in the gallery will create a space of slow viewing, thoughtfulness, and adornment.

See Exhibition Access details at the bottom of this page

This exhibition has been kindly supported with a Culture Grant from Wakefield Council as part of Our Year – Wakefield District 2024, and also by the Henry Moore Foundation.