Behrang Karimi

Behrang Karimi’s work is notable for its unique contribution to painting, but also for its ability to cross mediums, incorporating furniture, tapestry, drawings, and prints. I had the pleasure of getting immersed in his fantastical universe through Theory of a Smell at Ermes Ermes in 2024, in which the artist worked across said formats to create a dialectic around scent memory. Karimi, in an idiosyncratic fashion, channeled the smell of his mother’s lipstick, but also his personal-diasporic background (the artist was born in Iran and raised in Germany) through other media, a tactic whose sensory apprehension demanded critical observation.

Artworks are successful when pursued with a relentless personal conviction. In Karimi’s work, philosophical pursuit is omnipresent, in contrast to the embodying or engendering of memory. He himself has called this quest an “act of searching” where “every painting becomes its own stage” driven by free association, cognitive stimulation, and a spirit of inquiry. Therefore, it is to no surprise that many of his paintings are characterized by their threshold space, teetering between abstraction and figuration, with delicate brush strokes featuring scenes at the moment of coalescence. In his smaller scale works, at times canvas is layered upon canvas, creating a characteristic surface texture, with frayed ends, like patchwork.

For his exhibition at the Kunstverein Düsseldorf, titled Pocket Call, Karimi designed a methodology around the ellipse, a mechanism that recalled cosmology and the curve. The paintings reminded of the multiple passageways in history; the embrace of the umbilical cord of life. They also conjured entanglement, the fleeting moments found in dreams, or sundry treasures tucked away in the unconscious. This body of work represented the perfect instantiation of intuition. Of the kind that tailors to the unknown, amidst rafts of ordinary experience.

– Jennifer Teets