The Swiss Shirana Shahbazi is an internationally acclaimed artist who has, time and again, infused the medium of photography with new approaches. Coinciding with her participation in the 94th edition of the leading Swiss art magazine Parkett, and the run-up to her solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern, Deweer Gallery has the great pleasure to present her work to the Belgian public for the first time.

Few contemporary artists have been able to draw this level of sensuality, conceptual rigor and visual impact from the medium as Shirana Shahbazi.

In her work, Shahbazi effectuates an interaction between abstract and figurative photography, between painting and photographic practice, between historical genres and contemporary forms of presentation, and between an analogue methodology and a digital mind-set. This gives rise to a new visual language that is at once simple and sophisticated. Her work, irrespective of trends, draws upon the full aesthetic and philosophical potential of photography as a medium, and of visual imaging in general.

This has rightfully earned her numerous exhibitions of international standing, including at the 50th Venice Biennale, in MoMA - Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum in New York, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and many others. In the exhibition she has designed for Deweer Gallery's Room II, her first solo exhibition in Belgium, she brings an overview of a number of recent developments in her work, including work that explore a new relationship between abstraction and figuration.