Stone-Ideas.com 
The sunrise is the theme in the monumental stone sculptures of the Iranian sculptor Behnam Akharbin. He depicts this everyday event, which has taken place on earth every 24 hours since time immemorial, from two perspectives: firstly, his sculptures freeze a sequence of moments until it is completely light; secondly, you could look through or along most of the works and thus follow the movement of our star on the horizon.
In any case, it is the play of light and shadow on the earth’s surface that Akharbin creates in marble.
And his way of depicting things is always positive with regard to the rebirth of the day and carries with it the anticipation of what the next few hours may bring.
Akharbin has worked on the motif in many variations and depicted it not only in stone but also in metal or mixtures. He is currently planning to turn to bronze.
He came to the topic through the poem “Sunrise” by the Iranian poet Fereydoon Moshiri (1926–2000):
At the moment of wonder!
All of a sudden
The sky and the earth are full of wonder!
The time and heart was beating fast
Sunrising.
It should be noted that he came across the poem after his studies when he was studying muqarnas. They are unmistakably present in his sunrises: muqarnas are patterns from Islamic and Iranian art and often appear in vaults, domes or niches or on the balconies of minarets. The design shows the influence of geometry – the basic structure of the patterns is created by rotating squares in a circle.
This is how the individual elements are repeated and rearranged, and there is an enormously strong direction in which the pattern seems to point.
Ideal for capturing the movement of the sun across the sky.
Or is it the crystals in the rock that he is showing?
Akharbin was born in Ardabil in 1985 and comes from a family in which art and creativity were at least a topic. His father is an architect, his uncle is a painter. As a child, he himself loved painting all kinds of objects. After school, he studied graphic design and discovered his passion for sculpture.
A first highlight in his artistic career was studying sculpture at the Fine Arts College at the University of Tehran. After graduating in 2014, he devoted himself to abstract art and domestic designs in architecture, carpet design and handicrafts.
Then he came across poetry, and in 2018 at the Sculpture Symposium in Izmir, Turkey, he had great success with the first sunrise in stone.
He has made numerous smaller works that he exhibits in galleries. His great passion, however, is monumental sculpture, as he writes to us: “I want people to interact with my sculptures, even imagine their own meaning. I think it is a way of showing myself to the world. Every work contains a piece of me.”
He says of stone as an artistic material: “I like it because it has many features and colors, and sometimes it even talks to you saying how I shall carve it.”
Behnam Akharbin (Mail)
Photos: Behnam Akharbin