Haines Gallery proudly presents The Body Politic, an online viewing room showcasing a suite of new paintings by Iranian-American artist Shiva Ahmadi. In these works, Ahmadi mines the expressive potential of paint while exploring the body’s relationship to trauma and anxiety.
Well-known for exquisitely crafted paintings, sculptures, and digital animations that use formal beauty to seduce viewers into scenes of conflict and chaos, Ahmadi’s recent works are introspective, intimate, and personal. Charged with emotion, these latest paintings illuminate a different kind of stress, one borne from a heightened awareness of the body, its susceptibilities and vulnerabilities, and the self-consciousness that arises from constant scrutiny.
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Shiva Ahmadi
Untitled, 2020
Retaining the lush colors and exacting brushwork that are the hallmarks of Ahmadi's work, several pieces in The Body Politic focus on the female form. Viscous washes of acrylic paint render the curvature of subtly defined musculature, coalescing in dense, glossy swirls of pigment around each figure's abdomen—hot, churning and visceral, a site of turmoil and anxiety. Each figure is bold, sensuous, and mysterious.
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Ahmadi describes her latest paintings as an unconscious response to our current moment, to a virus that "makes you very aware of every symptom, of every part of your body: how you move and interact with people and how much space you are taking."
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"Contradiction is something that I grew up with. My paintings are layers of hiding and revealing, beauty and ugliness, abstraction and figuration, gesture and control, transparency and visceral texture."
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Another series of paintings, also realized this year, continue to draw from and subvert the artist traditions of the Middle East, reflecting a tumultuous political landscape rife with corrupt leaders and a populace standing idly by, unwilling to intervene. Yet these new paintings offer loose compositions than Ahmadi's previous works, demonstrating a tendency towards abstraction. As such, they reflect both an increasingly destablized world and an important shift in the artist's practice.
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Shiva Ahmadi
Red Light, 2020
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"When I look at Persian miniature painting from hundreds of years ago, I see the same dynamic that I see in the world today. There is always a king sitting on top of the throne, while his minions worship and follow him. My imagination runs wild."
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Shiva Ahmadi
Burning Car, 2019
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SHIVA AHMADI
b. 1975, Tehran, Iran | Lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, CAWorking across a variety of media, Shiva Ahmadi examines the traumas and anxieties of war, migration, and of the body. In addition to a recent solo exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA; Asia Society Museum, New York, NY and Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, her work has been exhibited at and collected by institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grey Art Gallery at New York University, and Rubin Museum of Art (all New York, NY); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada; and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan. Ahmadi has been awarded the Anonymous Was A Woman Award and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (both 2016) and a residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbertide, Italy (2018). Shiva Ahmadi, a hardbound monograph of her work, was published in 2017 by Skira.
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