kurdistanart: Bahram Hajou1952 Kurdish artist ,He lives and works now in Münster

BAHRAM´s art invites to transform the famous destination of great poetry, in that it appears as a speaking picture. BAHRAM creates such oeuvres. If you look at the past 10 years of his painting, you can not but recognize that he is obsessed by a vision. The subject of his art is the human being I his solitude. And this vision which – as he shows us – may become a picture but goes beyond language, is translated into the diction of symbols.

The continuity of the motives is impressing: the face, the body of the human being, the empty room, the inaccessible towers, the dilapidated homes. Landscape as force of nature or chimera. By the end of the 80ies, all this was already present but still domesticated by a strong mimetic element. The villages were still villages in the form of a group of homes in front of horizons. Since then, however, in particular after the predominantly informal years from 1991 until 1993, a tremendous concentration of the expression had its way.

It appears as if you could speak of a persecution by faces, of eyes looking from below to above, of masks, square, massive, threatening. Looks which never arrive and hands tying to reach the unreachable with long spread fingers. In this picture world we did not encounter the Bacon´s brutality of battered bodies; in contrast; a permanent ironic citation of civilization escorts the observer, the creatures with collar and tie.

And yet, it is a fantastic world in which heads and bodies are put side by side. A face with a piercing expression in its eyes contrasts not rarely with a featureless face. The unattainability segregates the couples. A blue face up to each other as “Duumvirat” of a reign´s allegory.

There is something unalterable in his pictures – as if the image of mankind seems to be a verdict. However, apart from this urgency liberty has also its effect being present as space and color. The image of mankind changes to a memorial of its vulnerability.

Luminosity and gloom, water, soil, gale are already present before the individuals. It appears as if they grow out of a primordial chaos, as if they were released from the force of the elements. BAHRAM is the creator of a dramatic world of painting.

Prof. Dr. Christoph Miething