Azadeh Razaghdoost
Born in 1979, Tehran, Azadeh studied at the Academy of Fine Art and at the Art University in her native city. She has always been captivated by the colour red. Blood, love, and passion all convey the visceral reactions she experiences while working and at the moment she is confronted with the finished work. Her hands are her tools, the controlled weapons with which she swiftly wounds the fleshy backgrounds of her canvases, bloodying them with a weeping rose, a beating heart or a uterine form. The one constant element in Azadeh’s work is the colour red with all its eroticism, love and remembrance. Red infallibly drew her to the rose and the heart and a series called Les Fleurs du Mal after the collection of poetry by Charles Baudelaire, not because it harboured any ideas of controversy but because it demonstrated to viewers beauty at the moment of its death and deterioration. The surface of the canvas became a scene filled with accidents, impulses and physical reactions creating one of two outcomes; unrecognizable violence or pleasant ornamentation, final testaments to love’s and life’s suffering and inevitable end. With these thoughts she wounds her canvases further, scratching the words of William Blake, “Oh Rose, thou art sick!”.
She is a member of Badaneh Group, Iranian Society of Painters, and the Visual Arts Society of Iran. She has exhibited widely in Iran, the UAE and Europe, including in Candlestar's Whispered Secrets, Murmuring Dreams and Masques of Shahrazad.
