‘An Expression of Desire’, Cyrus Mahboubian

HS Projects is delighted to present An Expression of Desire, a commission of four recent works by Cyrus Mahboubian, archival pigment prints on Hahnemuhle paper with acrylic paint detail.

‘The artwork I’ve produced for 101 St Martin’s Lane builds on my recent polaroid “composites”, small-scale works in which I cut-and-combine photographs made during meditative walks in various landscapes, including the English countryside, North Africa and the American West. By bringing together often-unrelated images from my archive based on their visual qualities and how they interact with each other, photography ceases to be purely descriptive and instead exists somewhere between representation and abstraction. For me, this relates to our experience of being immersed in nature and how our memory can be affected by the passage of time.’

‘Taking this concept to a large scale for the first time, it is my hope that the works at 101 St Martin’s Lane will evoke our inherent connection to the natural world, as well as a sense of stillness and of wonder that allows the imagination to play a role when viewing them.’

Cyrus Mahboubian is known for his contemplative approach to photography and continued use of analogue materials, especially polaroid. His intentionally slow process is a response to the increasing influence of technology in our lives and an escape from the fast pace of life. These black-and-white landscape-based images are more imaginative than straightforward landscapes, so somewhat abstracted, and each one is hand-finished with a selective use of iridescent gold paint, making the work unique, rather than just a printed ‘editioned’ photographic print.

For the 101 St Martin’s Lane commission, Cyrus Mahboubian has selected some previously unprinted images and printed them large exclusively for 101.

HS Projects commissioned An Expression of Desire on behalf of KGAL.