October Gallery presents Spirit Worlds, a bold new series of works by West African artist, Julien Sinzogan, in his first UK solo show.

Sinzogan originally trained as an architect and his use of painted pen-and-ink displays the astonishing, technical sophistication of a master draughtsman. His work is as much about the transmigration of African ‘soul’ – the persistence of her dreams, visions, ideas and unique cultural identities - across the Atlantic to the New World beyond, as it is about the return of the spirits of slaves to the African shores.

Born in Tehran, in 1972, Golnaz Fathi is an influential member of an exciting group of contemporary artists to surface in Iran over the last several years. Whilst studying Graphic Design at Azad University, in Tehran, Fathi became fascinated by the expressive potential of traditional Persian calligraphic forms and immersed herself in a sustained six-year study of traditional calligraphy, where she became one of only a tiny handful of women trained to the highest level within that discipline. At this point Fathi made the conscious decision to fulfil her career as an artist rather than to continue within the privileged world of pure Islamic calligraphy, practised predominantly by male calligraphers.

Rachid Koraïchi’s refined work perfectly exemplifies this quest to embody a complex spiritual vision by means of works on paper of exquisite subtlety and imagination. The work of Koraïchi, a Sufi by familial practice, is explicitly devoted to the expression of the mystical elements of the Islamic tradition. The central theme of Ecstatic Flow relates to the lives and teachings of fourteen Sufi masters dating from the 7th to the 17th Centuries, presenting fourteen sets of eight lithographs, one for each of the subjects treated. The subjects include such well-known figures as the mystic Ibn El Arabi and the poet and traveller Jalaluddin Rumi, as well as lesser-known (in the west) masters like Ahmad al Tijani.