LINLEY is proud to present a solo exhibition by London based artist, Maryam Eisler.
Opening November 4th, 2021, this new series represents a voyage into the past, propitiously centred on the present.
Images captured in the early-winter light at Leighton House – the iconic Victorian Kensington home of Orientalist Lord Leighton – and inspired by the colour, gloss and character of 1980s New York – picture an incongruous fairytale set in the heart of Isfahan.
Eisler’s images beckon. Patterns merge. Colours collide. The impossible gives us pause from reality. Taken just as restrictions were easing after the height of the pandemic, these images burrow into temporal and psychological rabbit-holes, like a modern day Alice in Wonderland. Intimate in scale and framed ornately, Eisler’s images skilfully beckon us into the fairytales she creates, one where references collide and overlap.
The magic in these images comes precisely thanks to this merging of cultural references. Eisler’s homeland is Iran, where turquoise-tiled domes are mere extensions of nature itself, but she spent many formative years in Europe, steered by the likes of Baudelaire and European tunes of the erotic, and the exotic, and then also in New York where colour and gloss dominated for so much of the 1980s and 1990s.
This unusual perspective combines place, colour, history, beauty and meaning in Leighton House, transporting the viewer into another world, one that belongs distinctly to the photographer’s own past. Curated by Art Historian Carrie Scott, this is the first collaboration between the world-renowned brand and the artist.
The partnership is a natural one, given LINLEY’s reputation for fusing striking design with exemplary craftsmanship and the artist’s own exemplary execution of concept.
“The home we seek is in eternity;
The Truth we seek is like a shoreless sea,
Of which your paradise is but a drop”Attar’s Conference of the Birds
About The Artist
Maryam Eisler is a London – based photographer and author. Her photographic work, the crux of which is centred around the Sublime Feminine thematics, is represented by Tristan Hoare in London and Harper’s Books in New York. Maryam has additionally shown at Photo London, Dallas Art Fair, Unseen Amsterdam, Space Gallery St Barth, Bermondsey Project Space, and Art Marbella. Maryam is a contributing editor to LUX magazine, a Condé Nast title as well as contributed photographically and editorially to Vanity Fair (‘On Art’ – UK), Harpers Bazaar Art, Harpers Bazaar Interiors and Vogue Arabia.
Maryam’s book, Voices: East London for which she is both author and photographer was published in 2018. She has additionally edited several other Thames and Hudson titles to include Sanctuary: Britain’s Artists and their Studios, Art Studio America: Contemporary Artist Spaces and London Burning: Portraits from a Creative City among many more. Maryam sits on the advisory board of Photo London, is a nominator for the Prix Pictet photography prize, and is an ambassador for Unseen Amsterdam photo fair. Maryam is a graduate of Wellesley College and Columbia University.
