Damonfar Visual Arts Festival helps find new talent: Aghdashlu and Seifollah Puya-Rad
Veteran Iranian painter and art expert Aidin Aghdashlu, who is presiding over the jury of the 6th Damonfar Visual Arts Festival, says he believes the festival helps find new talent.
Iranart : He made the remarks in a press conference held at the Institute for Promotion of Contemporary Visual Art on Monday.
The Damonfar Visual Arts Festival is dedicated to artists under 25 years of age and the sixth edition is underway at Tehran’s Mellat Cineplex.
“The young generation wants and seeks its own share in contemporary art, and encouraging this desire and discovering and encouraging young talent is the main duty of the festivals,” he said.
Continuing he said that he thinks any type of festival or art activities that help praise art is a good thing to do.
“Making people acquainted with art is admirable and I relay praise to the organizers of this festival from deep down in my heart for their protracted efforts to promote art,” he remarked.
“Art reflects the society and its people and the paintings being shown skillfully reflect the interests and joys of the people,” he added.
“The young generation from all walks of life create their works based on their interest, joy and environment. The collection of 121 works on display reflects the differences in opinions, knowledge and skills, and seeing all these works is really pleasing to me,” he explained.
“During the past few years, we have witnessed considerable growth in the development of young artists who are now among the major artists of their time. We can easily distinguish 20 to 30 young artists who began their works with Damonfar and this is a great achievement,” he asserted.
Damonfar Managing Director Seifollah Puya-Rad, also attending the conference, said that veteran artist Mohammad-Ebrahim Jafari will be honored for his lifetime achievements during the closing ceremony at Mellat Cineplex on Friday, Jan. 20.
He also noted that every year after the biennial, an exhibition of participating artworks is set up to offer the works for sale to help encourage more young artists.
The Damonfar Company is the Iranian representative of France’s Pebeo and Germany’s Faber-Castell, two companies that manufacture art materials.
The first place winner will get an opportunity to travel to Germany to visit the Faber-Castell factory.
Photo: Damonfar Managing Director Seifollah Puya-Rad (L) and jury president Aidin Aghdashlu attend a press conference in Tehran on January 16, 2017 to brief the media about the Damonfar Visual Arts Festival. (Honaronline/Saeid Rabiei)
Source: Tehran Times