Yari Ostovany
May 13/14 and 20/21
Born in Iran in 1962, Yari Ostovany moved to the United States at the age of 16 and pursued his studies in Art first at the University of Nevada - Reno and then at the San Francisco Art institute where he received his MFA in 1995. He is the recipient of Sierra Arts Endowment Grant, Craig Sheppard Memorial Grant and Sierra Nevada Arts Foundation Grant. Recent solo exhibitions include The Yard: Columbus Circle in New York, Stanford Art Spaces at Stanford University, Joyce Gordon Gallery in Oakland, Rebecca Molayem Gallery in Los Angeles and Aria Gallery in Tehran.
His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, Connecticut), Pasargad Bank Museum (Tehran, Iran), Chateau d'Orquevaux (Champagne-Ardenne, France), Permanent Collection of the University of Nevada - Reno Art Department and is represented by Foundation Behram Bakhtiar in France, Art Represent, Emergeast, and Ideel Art in London UK.
Yari Ostovany currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Ostovany's work is process based and improvisational, straddling the nebulous realm between the mystical and the mysterious and thus, to me, the spiritual. A personal journey of exploration through the alchemy of paint, color, light, texture and the poetics of space.
He is interested in the crossing point of the unconscious, the personal and the collective, and energies that come to surface from the interplay of primordial contradictory forces—those within and without—on the surface of the painting. An unfolding evolutionary process through densely layered organic compositions made over time with layers upon layers of thick and thin washes and glazes, luminous and opaque. Often starting with calligraphic gestural marks, solid forms which then dissolve as the layers explode and implode, are added, rubbed out, re—applied. Going back and forth until another dimension—a sense of resonance— arises, when the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts, where forms and marks become metaphors for a transcendent reality.
Ostovany approaches painting as the visual evidence of, and not a report on, an experience; not a representation of spiritual energy but a translation of it into light and texture, navigating the space between emergence and disappearance.