FAIG AHMED Born Baku, 1982 Lives and works Baku
Faig Ahmed graduated from the Sculpture faculty at the Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Art in Baku in 2004. Since 2003, he has been working with various media, including painting, video and installation. Currently, he is studying the artistic qualities of Azerbaijani traditional rugs – he disassembles their conventional structure and randomly rearranges the resulting components of the traditional composition then combines these fragments with contemporary sculptural forms.
Group exhibitions 2011 ‘On Soz’, Alternative Art Space, Baku 2008 ‘Fabulous Four’, Kichik QalArt Gallery, Baku ‘Steps of time, Contemporary Art from Azerbaijan’, Azerbaijani Cultural Year in Germany, Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Dresden, Germany 2007 ‘Aluminium 3’, International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Baku Azerbaijan Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice 2006 ‘Caucasus’, National Centre of Contemporary Art, Moscow
It can be said without exaggeration that the young artist Faig Ahmed,
Model
a graduate of the Academy of Arts, has already been able to find his own niche in national contemporary art. This is a feat achieved by very few. A sculptor by training, he was able to find a new area of commonality between two such diverse spheres of art as abstract
Diameter is 30 cm 150 cm
sculpture and classical Azeri rug making. Ahmed’s work was among those that represented the art of Azerbaijan at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. That was the first year Azerbaijan took part in this famous art festival, and so the nation’s pavilion included works that
Woollen carpet
most vividly incorporated the country’s ancient and medieval art in its modern expression. The works Ahmed have been also shown in Baku, Dresden and Moscow. 150 cm
Combining in unexpected ways the geometry of a loomed rug and the
Base of sculpture is polyester
stereometry of sculpture, Ahmed has found a profound correlation between the two. The artist repeatedly gives form to this idea when he creates a series of rug designs on metal. The warm and colourful rug compositions superimposed onto metal, a high-tech material, can be interpreted as the fear of emasculation of the national idea in the world today, or as the delightful persistence of the same traditional
Curved, 2011 Plastic and handmade woollen carpet; 150 × 150 × 30 cm This work is from an edition of 3 (Image shows 3-D rendering)
ideas. Ahmed has taken these spatial, three-dimensional compositions to a more refined understanding of this idea, in which stereometric figures have ornaments of Azerbaijani rugs on their surfaces and on which sections of carpet designs from various regions of Azerbaijan can be found.
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