MILAN.- Cardi Black Box, the Milan-based contemporary art gallery, announced an exhibition of over 60 works by Iranian-German artist Shirana Shahbazi, on view May 27 through July 26, 2013. In addition to displaying Shahbazi’s works created during the early 2000s, the exhibition will unveil four of her brand new abstract compositions.

Although Shahbazi works primarily with photography, she continually pushes the form’s boundaries by combining it with other media, such as painting, printmaking, and construction. The still-life theme is a recurring focus of her work, but Shahbazi also experiments with portraiture, landscape work, and history painting, questioning the dichotomy between modernity and tradition, epic and ordinary.

Shahbazi’s imagery is closely connected to the tradition of Western painting, particularly the Dutch and Flemish masters of the 17th century. The meticulous arrangements of fruits, animals, flowers, and jewelry bring to mind the vanitas paintings, containing allegories touching on the themes of death’s inevitability, the inconsistency of material goods, and the futility of earthly pleasures. Shahbazi creates new possibilities of representation by juxtaposing simple images against monochrome backgrounds in a dramatic manner.

Born in Tehran, Iran in 1974, Shirana Shahbazi moved to Germany at a young age. She studied photography in Zurich, Switzerland before completing a series of residencies in New York, USA (2003); Berlin, Germany (2006); and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, USA (2008). She now lives and works in Zurich.

Her critically acclaimed solo shows have been viewed internationally, including at Galerie Rudolfinum (Prague, Czech Republic), 2012; The Breeder (Athens, Greece), 2010; The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, USA), 2008; and Barbican Art Gallery (London, Great Britain), 2008; among others. She has been involved in group exhibitions including “New Photography” at The Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), 2012.