Echoes of the Silk Road: Bobur Ismailov’s Theatrical Canvases
Artist Bobur Ismailov is fascinated by textiles and costumes. His paintings resemble stage sets – empty houses or quiet courtyards behind city walls, inhabited by characters in ornate headdresses and voluminous skirts. The Uzbekistan artist himself calls them “symbolic narratives.”
His themes are loneliness and social isolation, but his protagonists also have fierce independence. His heroines—and it is mostly heroines—are often seen lost in thought by a window, alone, in darkness. Their profiles are reminiscent of an ancient fresco. Yet the exuberance of the fabric in the painting is distinctly modern, from geometric patterns to spring florals and rich oriental hues. Each painting is a tumult of shapes, forms, and colours.
Ismailov admires traditional, hand-crafted Uzbek textiles - Suzanis embroidered in silk or cotton with bright motifs, including irises, tulips, sun, moon, and the flowing Central Asian ikat designs. “Here in Uzbekistan, we have many different artists and painters who came to Central Asia from Europe and Russia before Communist times,” he says. (...)
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