Archetypes is the title of the current exhibition by Forough Reihani which from the very beginning takes the mind to Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and the father of modern psychology. From Jung’s view, archetypes contain images and sediments that have been led to human’s subconscious due to the repeated experiences of ancient fathers. In fact, each archetype is a hidden structural tendency that expresses the contents and dynamic processes of the collective unconscious in the context of elementary images.
In this exhibition we see 6 paintings and 11 decorative works, each separated by a specific title. These paintings that have semantic connectivity with the decorative work beside them, each represents one of the archetypes which have been among the earliest ones and artist has portrayed the early image of those concept based on her own point of view. For instance, the title of one of these works containing half of a face with cow horns is Gavaevodata, the first cow created in Zoroastrian cosmology. This is the same concept that leads us to the archetype that we have in our collective mind from a cow.
The decorative works in this exhibition are wooden objects in form of a spoon or barrette that their wide side has been painted based on the concept in artist’s head. Shape of these works are Reihani’s imagination of how those archetypes might have looked like. What shall be considered is if the title of “Archetypes” has been relevant to the works presented?
