With these newer works, I’m abstracting the body and trying to finish it with these forms that are handmade, that are not indexical sort of shapes. They’re just kind of a personal shape that I’ve taken on from an act of drawing. A lot of this idea is rooted in locating myself within a certain amount of time, space and place. I’m an immigrant, and so this act of inserting, or placing, or giving myself a surrounding is a way of recording a trace of my physicality. – Sheree Hovsepian
Iranian-born, American artist Sheree Hovsepian combines photographs of the body with materials like string, ceramic, and wood to create assemblage works that exist as poetic meditations of the human form. In Mountain, the shape of an arched back is echoed in ceramic wedges that radiate below. A string outline frames the composition in a diamond shape, adding a gentle tension to the composition while also heightening the physicality of the taut back. Hovsepian is currently included in 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani, with a whole room dedicated to her work. Hovsepian is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Bronx Museum; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others.
