Shirazeh Houshiary: The Sound of One Hand

For her first solo show in Los Angeles for over a decade, the British artist Shirazeh Houshiary presents new and recent works, exploring the origins of life and the mysteries of the cosmos, from a microscopic cellular level, to the stratospheric phenomenon of the aurora borealis. The show’s title relates to a Zen Buddhist teaching that instructs the student to listen to the sound of one hand clapping, in order to open their mind to such a possibility and transcend the constraints of the physical body. Despite not being a Zen practitioner, Houshiary realised that her work revolves around the insistent sound made by one of her hands, making tiny, looping, scratched marks in pencil onto large aluminum surfaces, building up worlds through the silence of her inscribed words.

Houshiary’s abstract paintings emerge from an initial pour of liquid color that floods the surface in irregular pools, before she then covers these areas with her own calligraphic gestures in graphite, which are in fact tiny repetitions of the Arabic phrases: “I am” and “I am not”, which she also likens to the natural act of inhaling and exhaling. For one of the two largest works in the show, entitled Enchanter (2024), Houshiary applies red pigment and pencil to a black ground in five ring shapes, recalling structures of carbon particles linked in a chain. Matching this in scale but cooler in tone, is the painting Earth Lament (2023), with two silhouetted blue figures that somehow materialized from the sedimented pigment, one appearing to soar and the other seemingly being dragged down. This accidental figuration also occurs in the work Cicada (2023), which could just as easily be a depiction of the wings of this insect as it could be a representation of its rhythmic song. At the other end of the scale are the galactic indigo swirls of So Far So Near (2024) and the bands of ethereal light crisscrossing the work titled Aurora (2023), recalling those seen occasionally streaking across a night sky.

Occupying the floor is a sculptural installation in nine parts, made from an open latticework of aluminum bricks in blue and green hues, each with the same footprint, but all at different heights, growing at increments of one layer at a time (the shortest has five layers, the highest thirteen). Entitled Maelstrom (2022), these curved forms, both hard and supple at the same time, recall not only the molecular structures of the red painting Enchanter, or “that primeval storm within the spiral of creation where something grows,” as the artist puts it, but also the shape of the ouroboros snake eating its own tail.

A second sculpture, seemingly another form defying logic and gravity, bursts from the wall. Its two sinuous, entangled lines are the artist’s approximation of the movement of a solitary wave – lending it the name Soliton (2024) – which is a type of swelling or surging motion that is not dependent on previous pulses, or followed by other waves. From such unfathomable objects, to minute molecules and gigantic expanses of space, Houshiary’s artworks represent a journey through everything from the chaos and messiness of the Big Bang to the silent contemplation of the resulting energies that surround every one of us.