Media Release – Bijan Amini-Alavijeh: The artist’s first major public gallery exhibition

The Art House celebrates its 30th anniversary and Wakefield’s Our Year festival with a new exhibition this summer by local artist Bijan Amini-Alavijeh.

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The Art House (TAH) proudly presents A Glimmer, a powerful new exhibition by artist Bijan Amini-Alavijeh, from August 31 to October 26, 2024. This exhibition coincides with TAH’s 30th anniversary and Wakefield’s “Our Year,” a festival celebrating talent and creativity in the city.

Supported by Wakefield Council and the Henry Moore Foundation, this project marks the artist’s first major public gallery exhibition. Sharing his most ambitious sculptures to date, this exhibition promises to be a thought-provoking exploration of spirituality and abstraction in contemporary art.

Wakefield-based Amini-Alavijeh’s innovative sculptures and large-scale wall-based artworks, explore sacred geometries and spiritual motifs. Utilising accessible materials such as paper and plaster, the

artist reimagines traditional concepts of beauty and ornamentation. Visitors will experience a unique blend of light, shadow, and multi-sensory elements, that interact with the passing of audiences, encouraging a reflective and immersive experience.

Amini-Alavijeh’s practice explores Medieval English and Persian art, and references both cultures’ understanding of sacred geometry and their extensive lexicons of decoration. His investigation into their motifs, patterns and abstract decoration uncovers a commonality of the same shape – the circle, a spiritual shape offering unity, wholeness, and perfection. This familiarity with their complexity offers the artist the opportunity to create sculpture and wall drawings that explore repetitive and intuitive making and experimental processes.

The artist celebrates hand-built sculpture techniques using repetitive and intuitive processes that incorporate organic, abstract forms. His recent research investigates how artists can reject hierarchies of traditional sculptural materials and processes, instead utilising accessible materials to explore how we can reshape our understanding of sculpture. Wakefield is a significant city for researching, sharing, and celebrating the history and future of sculpture, and Amini-Alavijeh’s project is perfectly placed to celebrate and reaffirm this idea.

Using diverse and affordable materials and techniques, the artist explores ideas of delicacy, harmony, spirituality, beauty, movement and decoration. His brutal and defensive sculptural forms will be presented in contrast with his use of light, casting shadows in the gallery to create a space of slow viewing, thoughtfulness, and adornment.

A Glimmer invites visitors to celebrate this unique fusion of history and modernity, and experience the depth of Amini-Alavijeh’s exploration into the complexities of art and spirituality. The artist reimagines the gallery into a reflective space that invites a calm and powerful contemplation for those who visit.

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