Booth: DS 05, DISEGNI
Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde participates in the newly-added Disegni section with a solo booth dedicated to Rokni Haerizadeh's long-term Fictionville series, which has taken many shapes and forms, from paintings, to drawings, to animations. The artist seems intent on unsettling the viewer; his intertwining of the familiar and the bizarre feels calculated to provoke amusement as much as outrage. The booth highlights 14 recent works on paper, where layers of paint and ink subvert and transform the printed image, turning human figures into human-animal hybrids. The background of each image is a news photograph or a still of a news footage, which is then prepared, painted with large washes of colour and drawn over with fine pen-and-ink lines that give the image its new contours. Vividly surreal, the works depict a tragi-comic bestiary of battling, escaping, marching characters and anthropomorphised scenery.
Works from Fictionville have been exhibited at several institutions such as the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg (2013); New Museum, New York (2014); the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston (2016); Guggenheim, New York (2016); Kunsthalle, Zurich (2015) and most recently The Restless Earth (2017) at Milan Triennial in collaboration with Nicola Trussardi Foundation. A monograph of the same name was published by Koenig Books, London in 2014.