Painting Contradictions - Interview with Pourea Alimirzaee

I am Pourea Alimirzaee and I’m a visual artist. I'm a painter. And, I came to Austria around 2015, so, that's what we are now: eight years ago. I came to Austria to study in the Conservatorium for studying bass guitar, jazz loops. But after one year of studying at the Conservatorium, I felt that that studies are not made for me to experiment things in art scene. It felt that they are very conservative, in the way of teaching and they want to create handcraftsmen, rather than artists. And, that's why I didn’t feel that’s my space to be in.

And then a year after I quit my studies at the Conservatorium and I applied for the Academy of Fine Arts. That's why right now I'm studying in the Academy of Fine Arts. So, yeah, as you see, this is this is one of my recent paintings that I made, and I do work with collages. So, I have mixed these different materials with my paintings.

Then, I want to sort of combine these two different surfaces with each other and then have a dialog between these sort of a rough, sort of an elephant skin, texture with that, sort of a fluid, soft, tender surface as well. I like these things because I'm interested about those opposite sides. And I do think that's the, that's my main sort of topic that I want to bring about human beings and about masculinity, about, you know, sort of rethinking of our masculinity, and so on. So, putting those sort of toughness and softness at the same time in one person.