Masoud Sharifian is a Tehran born artist based in London, perhaps the most controversial Iranian artist, is recognised for his politic and erotic content of his photographs, which blur the lines between art and pornography and politic.

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The art of Masoud Sharifian is a paradox. On one hand there is the severity of the subject: a shocking image; and on the other hand there is a macabre beauty in his work.

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Sharifian has undoubtedly a taboo-breaking art career and he tackles off-limit issues and confronts the hypocrisy of the country’s strict laws on censorship . His images confront the restriction that lies beneath the surface of Iranian society, his intention is to show you can still find anything and everything in Iran.

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In our age of digital advertising and social media exhibitionism, decorating photos is key to manipulating the appearance of reality to self-serving advantage. He fabricates his collages by hand, recycling and splicing found images and his own photographs in order to create a fresh meaning.

 

By dissecting and rearranging images with careful aesthetic vision, Sharifian creates work with an intriguing macabre darkness. He deals with the darker sides of the human mind through the undeniable and unavoidable beauty of the human body and eroticism. The universal human body, used as tool for seeking identity, is the focal point of his work.

 

Sharifian’ s images are many things, always moving between different styles, personalities and visuals - and that is visible in his art. He has been collaborating with several well- known artists, he's photographed Ash Koosha and Hichkas (Soroush Lashkary) , both known as the most controversial Iranian musicians.

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Whether he is capturing landscapes, still life, models for his collages or portrait of other artists, Sharifian’ s images represent the final stage of this thought process, reflecting on the human experience and human interaction.

 

• June 2016, Photographer at Ash Koosha’ s gig - Institue of the Contemporary Art,

• London March 2016, Photographer at Ash Koosha’s gig - Village Underground,

• London March 2012, Photographer at Take it Easy Hospitals' gig - Cambridge, UK December 2012,

• Poster photography for Hichkas Novembre 2011,

• Musician at Leighton Museum Festival with Roya Arab, Ash Koosha, Hichkas​

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