Azernews.Az

By Nigar Orujova

A collection of artworks by 137 young artists from Azerbaijan has been put on display by YARAT Contemporary Art Space, a non-profit organization promoting contemporary art, and the Luciano Benetton Foundation.

Collaboration between YARAT Contemporary Art Space and the Luciano Benetton Foundation began in 2012.

The artists were given "10cm x 12cm" canvas and were encouraged to apply their unique style and technique.

They used different media and drew their inspiration from different sources, while some were eager to experiment, others remained loyal to the visual tradition of the country. However, all of them without exception have experienced a pure joy of making art.

Photographs of the works and brief biographies of the artists were recently published in a special edition of the book entitled "The Colors of Wind and Fire".

"Azerbaijan: The colors of wind and fire" is an Imago Mundi collection, a cultural, democratic, global, non-profit project, promoted by Luciano Benetton with the aim of creating the widest possible mapping of the different contemporary artistic experiences of our world.

Each country is represented by the works of established and emerging artists, commissioned with the maximum freedom of expression, whose only constraint is the 10 x 12 cm format.

This collection is a way of bringing together art pieces by prominent artists (Fuad Salayev, Altay Sadiqzade, Mammad Mustafayev,Sakit Mammadov) and works created by young and emerging artists (Vusal Rahim, Ramal Kazimov, Afet Bagirova).

There are currently about twenty countries represented in Imago Mundi from Russia to the United States, Australia, South Korea, India, several Latin American countries such as Chile and Brazil, and African nations including Senegal, Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar, and by 2016, the objective is to count around sixty nations and over 10,000 artists.

The intention is to take the collections on a journey and, through exhibitions, catalogues and the web portal, to show these diverse artistic experiences to the widest possible number of people around the world, also in collaboration with private institutions and public museums like, for example, the Venice Art Biennale where Imago Mundi debuted in August 2013.

http://www.imagomundiart.com/collections/colors-wind-and-fire/