For some time now drawing has gained an immense popularity and esteem among artists as an autonomous visual medium. The Irano-German artist Haleh Redjaian has likewise made her mark primarily through drawing. Her repertoire ranges from hand-drawn works on paper, to large temporary wall and room drawings made of threads that she stretches to create linear structures. In addition, since 2013 she has produced abstract tapestries in which the traditional Iranian art of weaving meets with a reduced, constructive-concrete vocabulary of forms.

After figural beginnings, Redjaian developed her own abstract geometrical imagery. She often gets her ideas from her day-to-day surroundings: perhaps the structure of a house facade or an architectural element will inspire her, or maybe fabrics, literature or music. She does her drawings in pencil or coloured crayons on paper, at times also using ink, watercolours or acrylics, and now and then she works with adhesive tape. A distinctive feature of the artist is that she likes to draw on standardised squared, lined or graph paper, and often uses pages from for instance notebooks and calendars.

For her drawing The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, Haleh Redjaian has pieced together a variety of squared papers to present a square background. Superimposed on the ready printed grid is an accurately drawn but irregular structure done in fine diagonal lines that bring a subtle dynamism to the picture ground. At the same time the lineation condenses at the centre of the composition to form a large square shape, which is however quite faint. Taking several adjacent boxes at a time, the artist has placed small, dark, or even sometimes pale grey squares inside. The resulting hand-coloured boxes merge to form striking angular shapes – with no single one resembling the next. Similarly their distribution on the picture surface obeys neither a hierarchical principle nor any kind of symmetry. All in all the impression dominates of a chance excerpt from a rhythmic structure which, although based on a geometrical arrangement, eludes the demands of mathematical perfection through its details. Haleh Redjaian shows us quite impressively how the harmonious play between fixed grid and freely varied forms can produce an exciting, atmospheric composition. The poetic character of the piece is underlined by the title The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, which the artist took from the eponymous song by the band Garbage.

Haleh Redjaian

1971 born in Frankfurt on the Main

Lives and works in Berlin