Bizhan Bassiri. Creazione, curated by Bruno Corà, is the first major solo exhibition of the Italian-Persian artist (Tehran, 1954) that BUILDING Gallery is hosting in its spaces from January 30th to March 22nd, 2025.
The exhibition, developed on the three exhibition floors of the gallery, transports the visitor into an ancestral and timeless dimension, in which the works, which seem to emerge from a magmatic universe, take shape from time to time in sculptures and paintings marked by specific materials and colors. From the dominant red of the ground floor, through the blue pigment used in the works on the first floor, to the pitch-black darkness of the second floor, in which – the artist suggests – “Observing in the darkness, the Darkness I see.”

Making his debut in Rome in 1981, after studying at that city’s Academy of Fine Arts at the school of Toti Scialoja between 1976 and 1980, Bassiri distinguished himself among the protagonists of the generation that, in the 1980s, developed in Europe its own Weltanschauung under the sign of a “magmatic thought,” an authentic pictorial-plastic experience apt to combine foundations and innovative propositions of Western and Eastern art, building its own original lexicon of extensive poetic resonance.

With a solid path behind him, which is the result of memorable events and important encounters with major Italian and international artists (Kounellis, Boetti, West, Chiari, Anselmo, Kirkeby, Kosuth, Castellani, and others), Bassiri, with this first solo exhibition in Milan, highlights the linguistic maturity of his art, always kept within the registers of enunciative forms of a spatio-temporality that eludes the epiphenomena of actuality, turning rather towards dimensions where palingenetic vision, poetic intuition, and formalization of an iconographic system based on cosmological and mythical archetypes takes on the character of an ‘imaginary summa’.

In such a visual dramaturgy, Bassiri exhibits the essential figures of his poetics: the incessant transformation of matter, which he considers a permanent ‘storm’; the astonishment of light drawn from the artwork, and offered as an entity related to the individual gaze; the inescapable witnessing presence of the anthropological figure; the serpentine risk of the unexpected; and fate, an invisible but active regulating force and supreme register of art that perpetuates living tension, taking on timeless forms. Stretched in an indeterminable space-time, considered as eternal as existence, the work appears as an autonomous image, destined to show the enigmatic unstoppable process of magmatic thought, the source from which art springs.

Thus, the exhibition Bizhan Bassiri. Creazione is a paradigm of the artist’s core morphologies, characterized by real stations of works located in BUILDING Gallery’s environments, punctuated by the chromatic dominants referable to a color spectrum distinctive of his poetics. Several cycles of works are presented in the exhibition, including: the Specchi Solari (2024), steel surfaces crossed by lightning-like abrasions that deny the traditional function of the mirror as an object that reflects the world; on the contrary, it reveals their very nature as a source of light; the Particelle della Tempesta (2024), textural paintings resembling geological stratifications, which the artist obtains by macerating newspaper paper in tanks filled with water colored with natural pigments and the addition of glues; the Erme (2000-2024), which, borrowing their morphology from the ancient classical herm, are composed of an inverted truncated-pyramidal metal base on which the shapeless masses of lava stone heads are grafted.

This exhibition, conceived in close relationship with the gallery’s architecture, is among the most significant projects in recent years, conceived by Bassiri to present an episode of his work in Milan, taking into account the significant cultural and artistic history that has occurred in the city.
His artworks, found in international museums and private collections, have represented the Iranian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition in 2017.
Text by Bruno Corà