painting

The encounter between East and West, gesture and color

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Natural and mystical processes inspire Ostovany’s practice on a daily basis, driving him on a personal journey of exploration through the alchemy of paint, color, light, texture and the poetics of space: a constant pursuit of a transcendent reality. Yari Ostovany was born in Iran in 1962 and moved to the United States at the age of 16 where he pursued his studies in Art first at the University of Nevada – Reno and further specialized at the San Francisco Art Institute where he gained his MFA in 1995. From that moment on, he has …

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Conference of the Birds 28, oil on panel, 20 x 20 inches (51 x 51 cm), 1999

Yari Ostovany Exhibition at Joyce Gordon Gallery, Oakland, California 2020

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Exhibition at Joyce Gordon Gallery, Oakland, CAReview by DeWitt Cheng In 1935, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a review of the 1932 novel “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” by Bombay lawyer Mir Bahadur Ali, a kind of spiritual detective story outlining the quest of a young Indian law student for enlightenment. At the end of his arduous travels amid the lowest castes, he “perceives some mitigation in this infamy: a tenderness, an exaltation, a silence in one of the abhorrent men,” and deduces that a faint diminution of the darkness is the distant reflection of “a man …

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Pretty Is A Dangerous Thing

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  April 18 2017 | Berkeley, CA This April, Tasha Ostrander of braveARTconsulting had the incredible pleasure of a studio visit with Yari Ostovany at his Bay Area studio. A discussion unfolded of various material and ethereal/mystical workings of creativity that go beyond pretty and into the realm of discovered beauty. Beauty is not always pretty but informs and sustains itself on a soul level as a teacher and a signifier of deeper levels of thought, feeling and aesthetics.Yari Ostovany paints as if music, pigment and safflower oil all share the same viscosity. A baritone …

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Abstract Illusionism

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DeWitt Cheng The term Abstract Illusionism was used in the 1970s and 1980s to describe a kind of contemporary trompe-l’oeil, fool-the-eye paintings; realistic shading and pictorial space were employed for abstract expressionist paint blobs and drips, creating a kind of hybrid of abstract and realist art. I use the term here to suggest the dual nature of these works, hovering between abstraction and representation. Yari Ostovany’s luminous abstractions, with their mists of colored vapor dispersed here and there by soft-edged vistas of paint drips running at right angles—the Cubist grid as orthogonal precipitation—may remind viewers …

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LUXinTERRA – (2015)

Catalogs / / , ,

A rumination on the push and pull of energies underground as they undulate and billow below the surface, manifesting as cracks/forms on the surface of concrete sidewalks, translating these interaction of energies into light, shone upon and/or emanating from within. Inkjet transfer of digital images of cracks in sidewalks with Encaustics applied on panels. Click here for more info and to place your order

luxunterra2015

The Poetics of Memory – Yari Ostovany

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Jeremy Morgan Painting and at times music meet in the wordless. In the work of Yari Ostovany it may be considered as a reality. His work reflects an ongoing research through pure action. That action finds valency between intellect and intuition, each work functional as a psychic archiving, a material realization that is born of both reflection and enactment. The work is redolent with a sense of possibility. Each committed artist one assumes is committed to the recognition that every creative act is bound to the notion of communication indeed the mystical communication of experience. …

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