MARYAM EISLER: ONCE UPON A TURQUOISE PAST

MARYAM EISLER: ONCE UPON A TURQUOISE PAST
4–28 November 2021
LINLEY Belgravia
60 Pimlico Road
London SW1W 8LP

LINLEY is proud to present a solo exhibition by London based artist, Maryam Eisler. Opening November 4th, 2021, this new series represents a voyage into the past, propitiously centred on the present. Images captured in the early-winter light at Leighton House – the iconic Victorian Kensington home of Orientalist Lord Leighton – and inspired by the colour, gloss and character of 1980s New York – picture an incongruous fairytale set in the heart of Isfahan.

Eisler’s images beckon. Patterns merge. Colours collide. The impossible gives us pause from reality. Taken just as restrictions were easing after the height of the pandemic, these images burrow into temporal and psychological rabbit-holes, like a modern day Alice in Wonderland. Intimate in scale and framed ornately, Eisler’s images skilfully beckon us into the fairytales she creates, one where references collide and overlap.

The magic in these images comes precisely thanks to this merging of cultural references. Eisler’s homeland is Iran, where turquoise-tiled domes are mere extensions of nature itself, but she spent many formative years in Europe, steered by the likes of Baudelaire and European tunes of the erotic, and the exotic, and then also in New York where colour and gloss dominated for so much of the 1980s and 1990s. This unusual perspective combines place, colour, history, beauty and meaning in Leighton House, transporting the viewer into another world, one that belongs distinctly to the photographer’s own past.

Curated by Art Historian Carrie Scott, this is the first collaboration between the world-renowned brand and the artist. The partnership is a natural one, given LINLEY’s reputation for fusing striking design with exemplary craftsmanship and the artist’s own exemplary execution of concept.

©2021 Maryam Eisler