LONDON.- Barbican Art Gallery, London presents Shirana Shahbazi, on view through 20 January 2008. The exhibition is supported by Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council and Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation. Iranian-born, Zurich-based Shirana Shahbazi is the latest contemporary artist to be commissioned to make a new work for The Curve, the Barbican’s free exhibition space.

Shahbazi is creating an ambitious new installation that features a large mural painted directly on to the 80 metre long wall interspersed with some 30 photographs of differing scales. Working with black and white as well as intensely colourful imagery, her subject matter includes pensive portraits of young women, serene landscapes and vibrant still lifes. The exhibition opens 4 October 2007 and runs until 20 January 2008.

Trained as a photographer in Germany and then Switzerland, Shahbazi often uses her images, which derive from a cool and objective tradition of European photography, as source material for painted billboards and handmade carpets. For this she collaborates with Iranian painters and artisans. In The Curve Shahbazi is working with billboard painters from Tehran to reproduce her photographs in the technique and style typically used for commercial advertising. By altering the scale and transposing the imagery into a new medium or a style associated with another culture, she subverts viewers’ expectations and explores the complexity of national identity.

In 2002 Shahbazi came to prominence as the unexpected winner of the highly prestigious Citibank Photography Prize for her solo show at The Photographers’ Gallery, London. Aged 27 Shahbazi was shortlisted with well known and celebrated photographers such as Thomas Ruff and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. For the 2003 Venice Biennale, Shahbazi responded to the theme of the Annunciation with a wall painting installation of floor-to-ceiling portraits of a young woman whose gaze follows the viewer around the room. She entirely covered the ceiling with paintings of huge white lilies.

Shirana Shahbazi was born in Tehran in 1974, moved to Stuttgart in 1985, and has lived and worked in Zurich for the past decade. She has had solo exhibitions at the Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva, 2005; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 2003, and The Photographers' Gallery, London, 2001. Her work has also been featured in major group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2006; Kunstmuseum, Thun, 2006; 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, 2006; Sharjah Biennial 7, 2005 and Venice Biennale 2003.

JRP Ringier, in association with the Swiss Institute, New York and the Barbican Art Gallery, London, is publishing a fully illustrated book focusing on Shirana Shahbazi’s photographic works with a foreword by Kate Bush, Head of Art Galleries, Barbican Art Gallery, and Gianni Jetzer, Director, Swiss Institute, and an interview with the artist by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz. The book will be available in October 2007.

The Curve is the Barbican’s free exhibition space that wraps around the back of the Concert Hall. Launched in May 2006, Curve Art is a series of new commissions inviting contemporary artists to respond to the distinctive architecture of the space. These exhibitions enable artists to develop their work and realise projects on a scale that is seldom available. In the first commission, 11 May – 16 July 2006, Argentinean artist Tomas Saraceno created a dramatic video installation. A three-part installation by British artist Richard Wilson was on show from 27 September 2006 to 14 January 2007. From 9 February to 29 April 2007 Danish artist Jeppe Hein, known for his playful and interactive installations responded to the architecture of the gallery. The most recent work by Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrč , known for socially driven architectural projects, is a spectacular installation called Forest Rising, based on her time spent with local communities in Acre, the western-most state in the Brazilian Amazon.