Hossein Valamanesh: Assemblage, 1980 – 1985

Assemblage, 1980 – 1985, Hossein Valamanesh‘s second solo exhibition at Grey Noise, gathers together many of the persistent preoccupations of his career: how the individual locates themselves in relation to their environment, ephemeral and material encounters with the world and an exuberant desire for connection, each traceable to Rumi’s influence on the artist. Hossein Valamanesh’s works are composed of elemental substances: earth and water, light and dark, heaviness and lightness are brought into a precise formal harmony that belies their conceptual complexity.

In each work, visual conversations are initiated, and the viewer experiences a dynamic encounter with the world. This dynamism is guaranteed in works that appear poised precariously: pyramids of taut ropes, a low-relief cube that tricks the eye, water suspended above the gallery floor. The harmony of geometry is the counterbalance to the ephemeral – accurate without becoming stagnant.

Opening up a space for play, Valamanesh establishes immaculately constructed, yet precariously balanced sites for contemplation and encounter. That which is evasive and ephemeral, found between the transcendental and the every day, is distilled and made tangible.

Hossein Valamanesh (b. 1949, Tehran) currently lives and works in Adelaide, South Australia.
Graduated from the School of fine art in Tehran in 1970, he carried os further studies in visual arts at the South Australian School of Art.
He has completed a number of major public art commissions including Knocking from the Inside (1989), Adelaide; You just sit here… FARET Tachikawa (1994), Tokyo. His collaborations with Angela Valamanesh include An Gorta Mor, memorial to the Great Irish Famine (1999), Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney; 14 Pieces on North Terrace, in Adelaide and also completed the Ginkgo Gate, a new western entrance to the Botanic Gardens, (2009 – 2010), Adelaide.
Hossein has received numerous awards including the Adelaide Film Festival Art + Moving Image commission in 2015, the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington DC in 2014, the Australia Council Fellowship in 1998 and the Australia Council Residency in Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin in 1991.
His work is included in most major public Australian art collections and was acquired by the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris in 2014.