Between Ornament and Structure

Barvinskyi Gallery is pleased to present “Between Ornament and Structure”, a solo show by Farniyaz Zaker (b. 1982 Tehran).  A multidisciplinary artist whose work spans the fields of textile art, sculpture, drawing, print, video and installation, Zaker has long been interested in how architecture, textiles and the body interact to shape our perception of space, boundaries and identity.

The same themes reoccur in Zaker’s current show at Barvinskyi Gallery, where the focus largely lies on the space-making qualities of textiles. The show draws on the ideas of the seminal Viennese modernist architect Adolf Loos, who called for an architecture informed by the functionality of textiles (Das Prinzip der Bekleidung, 1898) and suspicious of ornamentation (Ornament und Verbrechen, 1908). But the show also questions the juxtaposition of structure and ornament, for example, by turning decorative features, such floral patterns that are widely used in textiles, into fundamental elements of structure. Most of the structures thus created or evoked are barriers of one form or another.