Yari Ostovany

Born in Iran in 1962, Yari Ostovany moved to the United States at the age of 16 and pursued his studies in Art first at the University of Nevada – Reno and then at the San Francisco Art institute where he received his MFA in 1995. He has has exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally, and is the recipient of Sierra Arts Endowment Grant, Craig Sheppard Memorial Grant and Sierra Nevada Arts Foundation Grant. Recent solo exhibitions include The Yard: Columbus Circle in New York, Stanford Art Spaces at Stanford University, Far Out Gallery in San Francisco, Rebecca Molayem Gallery in Los Angeles and Aria Gallery in Tehran, Iran.

Works are made over time with layers upon layers of thick and thin washes and glazes, providing both luminous and opaque passages. Often starting with gestural marks, these solid forms then dissolve as the layers explode and implode by adding, rubbing out, reapplying, scouring into, and scraping away. The practice of going back and forth only stops when Ostovany senses the whole has become greater that the sum of its parts.

“I see abstraction as representational insofar as it is a representation of a psychic state, not an external reality. The trajectories in contemporary painting in which my work belongs range from Abstract Expressionism in the west to Persian, Taoist, and Zen aesthetic sensibilities in the East, and other perennial visionary paths of wisdom.”

His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, Connecticut), Pasargad Bank Museum (Tehran, Iran), Chateau d’Orquevaux (Champagne-Ardenne, France), Permanent Collection of the University of Nevada – Reno Art Department and is represented by Foundation Behram Bakhtiar in France, Artscoops in Lebanon, Art Represent, Emergeast, and Ideel Art in London UK.

For more information, visit the artist’s website: www.yariostovany.com
Contact: Yari Ostovany