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Brian Gross Fine Art

March 5 - April 26, 2009

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49 Geary Street 5th Floor San Francisco, CA 94108
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The Space of a Line Hadi Tabatabai, Thread Painting #20, 2008
Bay Area artist Hadi Tabatabai opens an exhibition of new work, “The Space of a line,” at Brian Gross Fine Art on March 5, with a reception for the artist from 5:30-7:30pm. Tabatabai's work is an elegant combination of drawing, painting and sculpture that explores ideas of meditation and perception. The meticulous crafsmanship of these intimate, enigmatic works invite self-reflection. On view through April 25, 2009. For his first solo exhibit with Brian Gross, Tabatabai continues his exploration of the line as a physical space. Working with a variety of materials, in addition to paint, Tabatabai creates “paintings” with a sculptural, three-dimensional quality. The works, which range in size from 5 x 4 inches to 30 x 24 inches, are intricate constructs made out of basswood, thread, styrene, bee’s wax, and grout. He creates subtle shifts within the surface plane, delineating lines by slightly raised or lowered edges to create grids. Through the use of light and shadow, depth of field, and other optical obfuscations, the positive and negative space in the grid becomes indeterminate. The resulting work evokes the relationship between what is imagined on the surface and what is actually rendered— questioning the perception of what is seen. Hadi Tabadabai was born in Mashhad, Iran, in 1964 and immigrated to the United States in 1977. He received a B.S. in Industrial Technology from Fresno State University (1985) and a B.F.A. in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute (1995). His work has been shown widely in London, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Philadelphia and can be found in the collections of The Achenbach Foundation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Progressive Corporation, Cleveland, Ohio, and Werner Kramarsky, New York City, among others. Tabatabai recently received a Pollock-Krasner Grant (2008) and has been an artist in residence at the Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, California (2007), as well as an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California (2006-2007).