After a grueling five year epic of experimentation and innovation, Behruz Studio present their collaboration with renowned artists Robert Doble and Simon Strong.
Doble & Strong have been collaborating since 2010 on avant-garde masterpieces that combine photography and paint on metal to portray the female body in constant states of metamorphosis. Erotic and challenging, the works have inspired a loyal following among collectors, critics and curators.
In their latest foray, Doble & Strong have teamed up with textile aficionado Behruz Aligorgi to create a bravura suite of 12 silk and wool rugs that will transform both home and office into a contemporary art museum.
Working from drawings and paintings prepared by the artists, Aligorgi travelled to Nepal to work with traditional Tibetan rug weavers to translate these surreal images into woven reality. The results are a far cry from the Buddhist and Chinese imagery that the weavers usually adhere to and posed immense technical and creative challenges for all involved.
“It was an adventure,” says Aligorgi. “It was an immense challenge, but one that paid off.”
The workshop in Nepal are a highly skilled Tibetan community with generations of hand woven rug manufacturing behind them. They live on the outskirts of Kathmandu, where the workshop is situated. They are very much family based and live near the workshop where their children attend nearby schools which we support. They practice Buddhism and all have a loving, calm nature. They are a pleasure to work with and are artists in their own right.
Combining the age-old crafts of colouration and weaving and the wonders of cutting-edge technology and materials, Behruz Studio specialise in rug, kilim and related textile sourcing, custom rug and carpet design, carpet repairs and restoration, conservation, cleaning and insurance valuations.
The Studio was established in 1984 in Melbourne and rapidly grew to the point where the enterprise moved to a purpose-built location in Glen Iris in 2007. Its combined showroom, studio and gallery maintains three levels in order to create different display areas – a grand display on the ground floor, the design studio upstairs, and antique collections above.
The Studio’s founder, Behruz Aligorgi, was a man of overwhelming curiosity, sincerity and generosity. His relentless fascination with all things cultural and exotic led him to travel widely, absorbing both the old and the new, the east and the west with equal passion and eventually leading him to establish Behruz Studio. Behruz was equally at home discussing traditional and religious designs with traditional weavers from the foothills of Tibet as he was arguing the contemporary aesthetics of modern art, leading Behruz Studio to becoming a delirious amalgam of both the shock of the new and the shock of the old.
With a collaboration spanning several years and four major exhibitions, the work of Robert Doble & Simon Strong is a unique combination of cutting edge photographic technologies and the time honoured use of paint in abstraction. While both artists are established solo careers, their body of collaborative work represents a self-contained and potent stream of artistic expression.
Fusing the tradition and beauty of the nude in art with genetic engineering, medicine, viral outbreaks and science fiction, the works of Doble & Strong are presented, vitrine-like, in perspex cases, their overwhelming beauty counter-balanced by the unsettling appearance of biological growths and fungal and bacterial blooms. The bodies of their subjects, while smooth and pristine are often opened with surgical precision, or conversely, pierced from within by the protrusion of horns or bone. The paint itself begins to suggest internal organs and fluids flooding to the surface or laid open and bare from the removal of skin.
Simon Strong and Robert Doble photographed by Søren Solkær
