The captivating designs of Tishk Barzanji
The captivating designs of Tishk Barzanji

The captivating designs of Tishk Barzanji

Tishk Barzanji is Kurdish. He was born in a region between Iraq, Turkey and Syria, which denied this ethnic group statehood.

He emigrated to London in 1997 as a young refugee, and much of his childhood remains imprinted in his memory as a source of inspiration for the creation of his work.

He still remembers his first day in London, when a woman approached him and said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but who are you?” to which he replied, “We are special, we are Kurdish.” Tishk accepted this perception of “difference” from an early age.

He never bothered to conform and rush “out into the night” to rejoice at the arrival of the weekend. He preferred to hide in his little utopia because he didn’t want to hide in factories or warehouses.

Tishk Barzanji is a visual artist based in London, UK. His work touches on modernism and the surrealist movement. His work revolves around space, colour, deconstruction, the removal of boundaries, an understanding of living space in this fast-moving world and human interaction within these spaces.

Before becoming an artist, Tishk Barzanji studied physics at university. His background shines through in his work: his obsession with the position of each line and object, and his studies of space and volume, make his works labyrinths in which we like to lose ourselves for long moments.

Visual labyrinths.

Social networks are full of artistic nuggets. Every day we discover artists working on the other side of the world, artists who might not have had the same visibility if they hadn’t been able to spread their art on the internet. This is the case, for example, of Tishk Barzanji. This young contemporary Kurd from Iraq creates designs with bewitching graphics and garish colours.

“I want to create a world where there are no limits to space and colour, a world where everything collides without logic”. This is how Tishk Barzanji describes his work.

He began with photography and watercolour, before turning to painting so that he could manipulate shapes and colours as he saw fit. From there, he quickly tried his hand at digital art, giving him total freedom to reinvent his work.

Since 2017, Barzanji has worked with a variety of clients, such as Rockefeller, The New York Times, Victoria & Albert Museum, Somerset House, NET-A-PORTER and Gucci. The artist has also provided artwork for Pharell’s The Good Time Hotel, and was recently featured in British Vogue.

2 Comments

  1. Sylvia

    Très intéressant ce mélange de visuel très coloré et surréalisme.
    Pour moi c’est une découverte ,car c’est la première fois que je vois des réalisations faîtes par un artiste kurde. On connaît assez mal leur culture ,et on découvre ici des œuvres très modernes.
    Felicitations Véronique .

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