Baku, February 16, AZERTAC

Mir Javadov and traditional Azerbaijani carpets will go on display as part of Buta Festival 2015.

This week will see world-famous London auction house, Sotheby’s, display unique pieces of Azeri art.

The work of Soviet era painter, Mir Javadov, who was born in Baku and worked in Moscow during the 60s, 70s and 80s, will be on show to the public in February.

Described as “an outstanding Azerbaijani artist of the twentieth century”, Mir Javadov’s work is bright, bold and full of hidden-symbols and subtext. The authorities banned his work because he refused to paint in the accepted, social realism style.

Javadov’s paintings, which are now some of the most sought after from this period, will be on display from 17 - 19 February 2015.

Having graduated from the Baku Art School in 1949, Mir Javadov spent a number of years in Leningrad, where he managed to secure a position at the State Hermitage Museum as a manual labourer and gain access to the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings which at that time left the storerooms only to be shown to Soviet cultural officials as examples of a degenerate bourgeois ideology.

The exhibition, which also includes some fine examples of traditional Azeri carpets from the Azerbaijan State Museum of Art, has been curated by Farah Pirieva to show the influence of Azeri carpets on Mir Javadov and his contemporaries in Moscow and Baku.

The 2015 Buta Festival provides a window to the Azeri Arts in London, offering unique insights into a country that is arousing our curiosity.