My essence is love; what is yours?

About the Artwork

“The artwork presented to you is from the ‘Waltz’ collection. The dimensions of the frame are 32cm x 37cm, vertical.” Amirhossein Sharifan’s Waltz Collection is an exploration of the relationship between love, movement, and line; a body of work in which dance becomes a metaphor for human connection, and words are transformed into the very body of emotion. In this series, Amirhossein Sharifan is not merely representing love; rather, he constructs a space in which the dialogue between lover and beloved takes on a visual and abstract form. What distinguishes Waltz is the artist’s engagement with Persian poetry particularly those rare and delicate moments in love poetry where dialogue, address, and whispered exchange emerge between two voices. Amirhossein Sharifan selects these verses not only for their literary significance, but for their emotional resonance and musicality. He rewrites these themes through his own language of abstract calligraphy, a visual idiom in which legibility hovers on the edge of ambiguity, and line transcends its communicative function to become an autonomous pictorial presence. In these works, line itself becomes dance. Its curves, extensions, twists, and entanglements evoke a distinctly waltz-like quality: a gentle turning, a fragile equilibrium, an intimacy defined as much by distance as by nearness. The rhythm of the line recalls the triple meter of the waltz a hidden order flowing beneath the apparent fluidity. With remarkable precision, Amirhossein Sharifan sustains a balance between control and release, much like dance itself, where freedom of motion can only exist within the discipline of rhythm. Conceptually, Waltz is a meditation on the nature of relationship. Love, in this series, is not presented as a static condition, but as an ongoing act of approaching, withdrawing, listening, and responding. The poetic dialogues embedded in the works are often not fully revealed; parts of them dissolve into the movement of the script. This deliberate obscurity invites the viewer into a space of interpretation, turning the act of seeing into an active and participatory experience. In Waltz Collection, Amirhossein Sharifan succeeds in forging a compelling dialogue between tradition and contemporaneity. He draws from the legacy of Persian calligraphy, yet reimagines it through a contemporary and abstract lens. The result is a body of work that moves fluidly between writing and painting, meaning and form, poetry and image. It is precisely this condition of being in-between that defines the identity of the series. Ultimately, Amirhossein Sharifan’s Waltz may be understood as a dance of words a dance in which love is translated into the rhythm of line. This collection invites the viewer to listen to the hidden music within the script, and to encounter those moments when language detaches itself from speech and, through visual movement, becomes a pure and poetic experience.