Azerbaijani artist's Fourchette exhibition to open in Baku
By Nigar Orujova
A solo exhibition titled "Fourchette" of Azerbaijani artist Niyaz Nadjafov will start at the YAY! Gallery in the Azerbaijani capital Baku on Saturday, April 27.
Nadjafov's works, which can be found in the United Nations headquarters and Geneva-based Palace of Nations, will be shown at the small Baku gallery until May 27.
The exhibition features a total of over 40 paintings, which amaze and shock the viewer from the first sight.
After viewing Nadjafov's works, a visitor will definitely see the unique artist's irony and even sarcasm in the crowd of grotesque characters.
The exhibition expresses the artist's ambiguous attitude towards "the eating process". Nadjafov admits that he can't stand and at the same time loves the idea of a buffet. He hates to watch people eat and also hates to see hungry people.
He believes that eating is something intimate and does not like eating in public. At the same time, he interprets feast as one of the forms of collective amusement.
"Humans are animals guided by instincts, by hunger. You can survive without anything but food and water. Fourchette is, in a way, a relic of the ancient past when people gathered to eat together. Eating has remained the ritual center of all gatherings to this day," Nadjafov said.
Speaking about the relationship between the current exposition and previous works, Nadjafov said that this is a topic which he had thought over in the past, but never to this extent.
"I wanted the viewer to feel what I felt while I was painting. At the same time, each opinion I hear about my paintings affects the way I see them afterwards, so it goes both ways, I guess. Painting is a necessity for me, a real necessity, like living and breathing," he said.
Nadjafov, 45, originally was trained as a soldier as well as coaching hand-to-hand combat. He began to experiment with oil paints only in 2004.
Inspired by other self-taught artists such as Paul Gauguin and Francis Bacon, it was only five years before the artist came to represent his country at the Azerbaijan Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Nadjafov has also exhibited his works in Paris, Moscow, Berlin and Geneva and they are held in both national and international collections.