For her first solo show at the YARAT Centre (Baku, Azerbaijan), Aida Mahmudova has produced an entirely new body of work that builds on her exploration of material as a tool for experimentation.

For the artist the process of destruction and recreation, of building layers and tearing them apart, of mixing various materials, such as paper, clay, cement, stone and, for the first time in this show marble, becomes an exercise for material growth and emotional healing. The total installation of sculptures and monumental wall drawings create a feeling of a transient place, half ruined, and half built, and one is reminded that entropy is an essential step of creation.

For Mahmudova the process is everything and her textured works act as tokens of memory, each layer exposing a particular moment on the artist's personal time-space continuum. Harmonious with the physical nature of her chosen materials and her preferred earthly palette, her deeply intuitive explorations continue to evolve across the spectrum of universal human sentiments of love, loss, memory and desire. In the artist's own words, “this artistic process is in a way an act of tearing away at our fundamental principles, which are manmade and therefore ultimately fragile.”