October 6 - November 17, 2001

Starting on October 6, M.Y. ART PROSPECTS will present a solo exhibition by the New York painter Pouran Jinchi, featuring her new series entitled AntWorks. The exhibition continues through November 17. Viewing hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11am-6pm. A reception for the artist will be held on Saturday, October 6, 4-6pm.

In Jinchi's new series, light and gentle hues such as peach, lemon, or mint create a poetic atmosphere and expansive space through which a cluster of dark elements travel elegantly across the canvas. Upon closer inspection, the motif is seen to resemble a procession of ants or a colony in the natural world.

AntWorks represent another inventive step in Jinchi's aesthetic crusade. Jinchi's ants are highly stylized with tiny eyes, oval-shaped bodies and angular legs -- all carefully outlined and textured. These fanciful creatures are strangely organic and even soulful. Perceived as a whole, they form curiously pleasing geometric shapes.

Kendal Kennedy, the artist/art writer, has written the following about Jinchi's AntWorks:
"AntWorks bring back a visual page from Pouran Jinchi's childhood memories and her fascination with ants and ant colonies. In these paintings she captures the essence of ants' life and follows natural ant behavior and culture."

Pouran Jinchi "Velocity" 2001 acrylic and ink on canvas, 54 x 54 in.

". . .Jinchi's exhaustive repetition of the ants on canvas showcases the overpopulated and crowded societies ants live in. She juxtaposes the individual ant with a group and then with an orderly or chaotic mass of ants clustered together with no space at all, creating a tension and a void for space itself. She contrasts the willful socialization against an unmanaged populace. This function of the ants is precisely what Jinchi follows masterfully with her forms. It becomes the perfect compositional tool on canvas with its nature-inspired form. Fluid and flexible, portable and light, shapes are formed by these masses of ants."
(Excerpts from an essay entitled "Form Following Function: Pouran Jinchi's AntWorks")

In an understated yet fascinating effect, the entire surface of the Antworks paintings is covered with the barely perceptible repeatedly etched Persian word for ant, moorcheh. Since the early 1990s, words and poetry have played a major role in Jinchi's hybrid painting blending Persian calligraphictradition with the vocabularies of abstract expressionism. For the first time, however, words and pictorial motifs interpenetrate, ingeniously co-inhabiting the subject matter.

Pouran Jinchi was born in Mashad, Iran. She graduated from George Washington University with an engineering degree. Later she attended U.C.L.A. and the Art Students' League to pursue her interest in fine art. Jinchi has been the subject of many solo exhibitions in USA and Europe. In December 2001 she will be featured at Shibata Etsuko Gallery, Tokyo. Her work has been placed in the permanent collection of Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.