AZADEH RAZAGHDOOST (B.1979) Untitled from the ‘Sick Rose’ series

Oil and pencil on canvas 100 x 70 cm (39 3/8 x 27 1/2 in.) Executed in 2008 Azadeh Razaghdoost was born in Tehran, Iran, and studied at Tehran’s University of Art in 2002, where she received a Bachelor’s degree in Painting. Now living in Karaj, Iran, her work is in the permanent collection of the Vallaplou Foundation, in lleida, Spain, and has been exhibited internationally. Recognizable by the color red recurrent in most of her paintings, which she associates with love, passion and blood, she is strongly inspired by the 19th century European poems of the Romantic Age, such as the Sick Rose poem written by the British poet William Blake in 1794 or Les Fleurs du Mal written by Charles Baudelaire in 1857. Also, interested by painting accidents and emotional properties to which the color red refers to, she expresses her feminine dilemmas and frustration. Thereby, as she pours and vigorously displays her allegoric color red, she adopts a powerful speech and embodies an artistic gesture of Action Painting and Abstract Expressionism just like Jackson Pollock or Cy Twombly with his compulsive style. She interrogates tension and impulse as she explores the emotive properties of colors, creating a poetic visual language.