The Life of the Garden. Homa Emami

About

Homa Emami is a conceptual artist that restrains her emotions, but stretches her senses, observes them sensitively, and translates these feelings and experiences into form. The works are diverse, sometimes complex, sometimes minimalistic, in execution usually simple, even coarse and yet with a sense for the aesthetics of the inconspicuous. Although in the classical sense she is a good draftsman and sculptor, she does not use her superb skills and craftsmanship in her objects and installations, so that the essentials can be noticed.

Emami’s work is characterized by the ambivalent relationship between modern approaches of reduction to basic elements of art, to her own observation and experience from living life. The works are deeply rooted in the existential themes of our time and related memories. In every work you can feel a discreet, restrained energy which can only be observed in those artists who create art from an inner urge and necessity. Her work is associative, and evokes the experiences and memories that every viewer has experienced; A way of appealing to common sensations, an archetypical long term memory. As a rule, many of the installations and structures are based on this archetypical schema, for example when you apply a tree leaf to a thin rod and write “garden” and put it in a lump of clay. It is the sensual experience of the leaf that hides the memory of nature in itself and the concept of garden, which associates each viewer with their own history. A minimal deformation that triggers a cosmos of memories and experiences in each other; A leaf, a concept, a rod as a tribe and the earth. Modest, but effective.
Homa Emami collects and archives, an intuition that makes sense of the interpretation of the collected or shaped elements. Collecting and archiving is a primal property of mankind, presumably because man consciously perceives the finitude and longs for the permanence and the eternal: the realization of his own fingerprint and the shaping of his own unique legacy.
Emami’s work is comparable to that of an archaeologist, who, despite his knowledge, has something to look at and investigate. With the difference that her objects and installations represent not only found elements, but are shaped and constructed by her. These installations have archaeological approaches on an intellectual level.

Homa Emami was born in Iran in 1955, and after graduating from Tehran’s prestigious Faculty of Fine arts, she continued her studies in Germany and at the moment is lecturer at the Music and Arts School of Bruhl. Shelives and works in Cologne. Her work has been shown in a number of institutions in Germany and Europe.