Kamran Khavarani

Born into an artistic family, Khavarani started painting at a very young age. When he was twelve years old, he began to study classical painting with the well-known artist Reza Samimi.
Khavarani completed his education in 1966 from Tehran University with a Master’s degree in Architecture and a Ph.D. in Urban Design. His graduate work was done under the guidance of his mentor Master Hooshang Seyhoun, the internationally renowned Iranian authority in art and architecture.
Khavarani’s earlier paintings were influenced by his classical and formal training in arts and architecture. Since his recent encounters with the philosophy of Rumi and other great teachers, both the artist and his art have been transformed and his current paintings carry subtle mystical messages.
Kamran Khavarani’s paintings represent a rare fusion of the philosophical and metaphysical with the aesthetic, and they draw viewers into the inner world. As Professor Boime wrote about Khavarani in his last book, The Birth of Abstract Romanticism: Art for a New Humanity, Rumi and the Paintings of Kamran Khavarani’: “Exalted by the love poems of the Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-73), Khavarani seeks to translate his ecstatic feelings into visual harmonies that celebrate the idea of Presence, the loving, creative side of existence potentially in everything and everyone.”
In The Birth of Abstract Romanticism, Professor Boime explored the details and effects of the artist’s style: “… Khavarani visually expresses his inner response to Rumi, evoking the oceanic and cosmic metaphors of the Persian mystic…Assigning to each of the four elements (earth, air, fire and water) its own unique color register, he gives his primordial visions - most evident in his glowing 'Creation' (2003) - a riveting presence. His skies and seas are saturated in unprecedented, emotional blue-greens, purples and oranges, and his mountain forms are often surrounded by a web of shadowy halos that convey a misty sensory impression of a world still in formation.”
In an open letter on July 28, 2008, Professor Boime wrote: “…Khavarani resurrects the romantic possibility that art can change the world by reaching out unstintingly to the heart and imagination of the individual spectator.” As Professor Boime wrote in the conclusion of The Birth of Abstract Romanticism, “It remains to be seen how the fallout from Khavarani’s painting will influence the history of art. Certainly his work goes against the grain of most international contemporary art and in fact purports to offer an alternative to it…‘Beauty’ is certainly the key word in Khavarani’s lexicon, as it represents the quality he has made it his life’s ambition to express—a harmonizing force to offset the ‘ugliness’ of so much bacchanalian and barbaric display that presently passes for art.”



http://www.khavarani.com/