Aida Mahmudova

Aida Mahmudova is an Azerbaijan artist specializing in development of contemporary art.

Mahmudova was born in 1982 in Baku. She is the niece of the third president of Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev. In 2006, she graduated from Central Saint Martin`s College of Art and Design in London with a BA Degree in Fine Art. In 2009, she graduated from the American Intercontinental University with a BA Degree in Fashion Marketing.

Since 2012, Mahmudova has been Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Baku. In 2011, she founded YARAT, a not-for-profit contemporary art organisation based in Baku, Azerbaijan. She works in installation, sculpture and painting to capture forgotten and marginal corners of her rapidly modernising country.

Since 2012, Mahmudova has been the Curatorial Director of the Baku Museum of Modern Art. She has participated in exhibitions with other artists and her works have been exhibited internationally. In 2015, she started her first solo exhibition ‘Passing By’ in the US at the Leila Heller Gallery.

Mahmudova’s artwork tends to be abstract. Without clear outline of her painting objects, she uses blurry paint strokes to create shapeless pictures. She stresses on the texture on her works. She favours thick dry layers of pigments and texture to make her works more dimensional. It helps to emphasise the texture of the paint and also the canvas. It makes a high contrast on her use of substantial textured paint and abstract displayed images.

Mahmudova’s choice of colour is various. Her artworks show good understanding of colour matching. She can use thick, high contrast colour to create energetic, colourful paintings. She seldom uses bright tone of the colour. For example, her ‘Rambling Vine, 2015’ demonstrates her use of thick, dry layer of pigment to create the rough texture. And she tends to tone down the bright colour like typical yellow to be macaroon yellow mixed with pickle green and grey.

These mixture of colour is cohesive to her paint brushes, bold and yet non-systematic or formulated. It could be interpreted as struggling against rules. See’ The neighbours’ and ‘The Fountain’, she do not limited herself using thick texture to express herself. She would use wet,low contrast, dripping liquid paints through the heights of canvas to express sense of malcony. Both textured and loose formed artworks suggested the same idea, Aida do not want to limit her paintings so that most of her works cannot find a clear cut outline of objects.“Memory is the material of my work.” – Aida Mahmudova often applied this brief but very precise analysis on her own art pieces.”

What makes her artworks so blurry and dreamy is her memories cannot be displayed exactly. “My art is a constant and continued investigation of my memory, as it informs my identity. The touchstone of this search and the main source of my inspiration are the forgotten, untouched, and undeveloped locations in Azerbaijan. Our physical world is shifting at a pace so rapid that our memories are frequently blurred, and our ‘remembered’ past is often forgotten or altered by our subconscious.” There are uncertainties in betweens. “Aida Mahmudova’s artwork delves into the emotive facets of ‘longing’ – specifically, the longing for the memory of a place, rather than for the place itself. The artist simultaneously meditates on how memory is tied to the debris of the past. Her paintings and other works present history as a collection of mementos, which appear fragmented and partial, and are accessible only through the mediation of personal perceptions and emotional responses.”

Most of the art work done by Mahmudova is inspired by the landscapes and the built environment. In 2012, her work “recycled” was exhibited in the 012 Baku Public Art Festival. In her recent art work, she is inspired by the traditional building and the architecture in her home Azerbaijan.

In 2015, Mahmudova had her first solo exhibition "Passing by" in the United States. In this exhibition, the seven paintings were displayed. The theme of the paintings was inspired by her previous work. Also, it is inspired by the built environment and the landscapes of her living space.

2012

• 012 Baku Public Art Festival, Baku, Azerbaijan
• Merging Bridges, Baku Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Baku, Azerbaijan
• Fly To Baku. Contemporary Art from Azerbaijan (Traveling exhibition), Hotel Salomon de Rothschild, Paris, France; Phillips de Pury & Company, London, UK
• Foreword, Alternative Art Space of YARAT, Baku, Azerbaijan

2013

• Love Me, Love Me Not: Contemporary Art from Azerbaijan and its Neighbors, Curated by Dina Nasser-Khadivi, Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku, Azerbaijan
• Love Me, Love Me Not, Curated by Dina Nasser-Khadivi, Collateral Event for the 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
• Home Sweet Home, Azerbaijan Cultural Center, Paris, France
• Home Sweet Home, Baku Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Baku, Azerbaijan
• Fly To Baku. Contemporary Art from Azerbaijan (Traveling exhibition), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Neue Burg, Vienna, Austria
• Spazio D – MAXXI building, National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome, Italy; Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Russia; me Collectors Room, Berlin, Germany

2014

• Here…Today, Old Sorting Office, London, UK
• Poetics of the Ordinary, Vienna Art Fair, The New Contemporary, Vienna, Austria

2015

• Vita Vitale, Curated by ArtWise, 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
• Making Histories, YARAT Contemporary Art Centre, Baku, Azerbaijan
• Exploring Inward, Louise Blouin Foundation, London, UK

• ^ "Passing by". Leilahellergallery.com. Retrieved 2016-04-15. 

• 2015: Luxury Lifestyle 2015 - CHELEBI Furniture & Decor

• "EXCLUSIVE AZERBAIJAN DESIGN FOR THE PLEASURE OF YOUR EYES :: News :: Luxury Lifestyle Awards 2015". Luxurylifestyleawards.com. Retrieved 2016-04-05. 
• "Luxury Lifestyle Awards 2015 / Список участников / Alt?nba? Jewelry". Luxurylifestyleawards.com. Retrieved 2016-04-05.