In collaboration with Hugomento, re.riddle is pleased to present NatureNature, a solo exhibition by Kamran Samimi, that runs through March 6, 2022.

NatureNature,  a new body of work by Kamran Samimi, is a meditation on the poetics of nature explored through the gesture of repetition. Through the careful manipulation of line, form and light, Samimi considers how spatial intervals, recurrence, and seriality serve as salient points to contemplate the notions of temporality and persistence, physicality and immateriality, and their dialectical tensions.

Across sculpture, installation, painting, and print-making, Samimi’s quietly serene works evoke a meditative response through his simple, reductive means. Harmonizing with the notion of repetition as distinct from duplication due to intimate and subtle differences within individual occurrences, Samimi’s minimalist markings and by-hand gestures echo the complexity of tidal waves, stone formations, sunrise vs. sunset, and rain. He asks, what is the most economic expression of form to convey this and conversely, how might a work be undone by too much or demonstrative of a reduction? His fading brush strokes, cut stone, and lightweight mulberry paper all contain a certain philosophy that observes cyclical living and dying through a feat of transposition and abstraction. 

Though directly made from and motivated by robust and enduring natural phenomena, Samimi’s works are fragile in effect. His paintings evoke a whispered movement in their materiality, delicate Japanese mulberry paper – and in their form, gentle, simplified and rhythmic strokes of his paintbrush. Evocative of the fluctuations and stillness of ocean swells or rain patterns, the composition reverberates the artist’s recurring movements of arm with paintbrush. Samimi’s controlled cuts into stone are regular and irregular, simultaneously giving a sense of tension, unity and continuity. Is there significance in the duality of persistence and temporality in Samimi’s materials, and what emerges from the to and fro between them? In what way is a simplified gesture the representative of these themes in its own right?

Samimi’s abstractions distill the profundity of the natural world down to delicate trace elements. Whilst perhaps not overtly repetitive on their own, his works together present a seriality, inclusive of the symbolic repetition of his own mark-making gestures. NatureNature is a result of Samimi’s meditations with the natural world and discovering his place within the recurring questions it asks of him.

The gallery invites you to a zoom conversation between the artist and Senior Curator Dakin Hart of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum on February 14th, 2022. Register here.