Where Blue Hides After Dark by Carina Chitsaz-Shoshtary

Artist list

Carina Chitsaz-Shoshtary

In the exhibition Where Blue Hides After Dark, Carina Chitsaz-Shoshtary presents work from her latest series Karma Chroma. Both titles indicate that colour is essential to comprehending the work. Colour is a carrier of cultural meanings, and although perception of colour is typically experienced as something unique to individual personalities, the interpretation of colour is clearly framed culturally.

A similar underlying principle applies to material. An individual observer can understand material from its aesthetic values, symbolic meanings, or from its material worth, but it is within a culture that the meaning/worth/aesthetic values of materials are defined. Simultaneously the meaning/worth/aesthetic values of materials define a culture, since the ability of materials to embody and convey meaning is central to our understanding of culture.

In the direct encounter with Carina Chitsaz-Shoshtary’s work, such underlying principles of culturally influenced perception are of no significance. Her pieces trill the heart and imagination of the viewer, an enchantment that might evoke visions of a fanciful flight on a giant bird through a mushroom forest. Inspired by the woodlands close to her home, Chitsaz-Shoshtary has worked intuitively with collected materials to create Karma Chroma. The aesthetic expressions of the pieces bear witness to this, but as often happens in Chitsaz-Shoshtary’s work there is more to discover. Beside the rather typical branches of German fauna, one finds a skeleton from a cactus plant layered with odd-looking scales. The scales are handmade, carved out of thick layers of graffiti-paint, a material the artist has found in the urban realm of a city. For Chitsaz-Shoshtary the process of collecting both types of material might be identical, but for the cultural reading of materials, the equalization of “natural materials” and spray-paint is rather radical.

from Karen Pontoppidan’s catalogue essay, Materiality in Colour or How the Object Became Blue

About the artist
Carina Chitsaz-Shoshtary was born in 1979 in Augsburg, Germany, and is of German and Iranian origin. She trained as a goldsmith in Neugablonz, Germany and studied jewellery under Professor Otto Künzli at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, graduating in 2012. Her work has been seen in exhibitions at the Museum of Applied Arts, Frankfurt, Germany; Museum of Art, Arnhem, Netherlands; Xuzhou Museum of Art, Xuzhou, China; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany; and Le Pagliere di Porta Romana, Florence, Italy. In 2012 she was awarded the Bavarian State Prize for Emerging Designers. This is her first solo exhibition in the United States.