Artist Profiles > H > Shirazeh Houshiary
Shirazeh Houshiary rose to prominence as a sculptor at the forefront of Britain’s young generation of sculptors in the 1980s alongside Anish Kapoor, Richard Deacon and Tony Cragg. Physics, Renaissance painting and world religion all inform Houshiary’s art, as well as her interest in the position of language in culture.
Her residency at STPI culminated in her first solo exhibition in Southeast Asia. She created a series of works that illuminate single words selected from the Hebrew, Sanskrit, Arabic, Mandarin and Latin languages, and their various colours reflect emotional states and respective nationalities. Through this lens of cross-culture likeness, the work calls into question the authority of culture as a dividing entity, asserting instead the common nature of humanity.
She has had solo exhibitions at The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2007); Tate Liverpool, UK (2003); and Museum SITE Santa Fe, USA (2002). Biennial participation include the Kiev Biennale, Ukraine (2012) and the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2010) and the 40th Venice Biennale, Italy (1982). Her works are in prestigious public collections including the British Council Collection, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Prato; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Tate Modern, London. Houshiary was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994.