From Nicole Kidman’s BDSM adventures to a pastoral docudrama by French twin directors Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma, here are five films to keep an eye out for this year
We have no record of them ever meeting, Leyly and Manoucher. At least one person suggests they might have, in 1970, when he spent an extended season in the land of his birth. She was a granddaughter of Mohammad Mossadegh, the ill-fated Iranian nationalist leader removed from power care of an Anglo-American coup. He was the descendant of a long line of cultured public servants and merchants. Both of their lives were marked by foreign itineraries. Both of them set out to be artists who went against the grain.
Yektai’s art studies began at Tehran’s newly formed Faculty of Fine Arts, colloquially referred to as “Honarkadeh,” where he encountered modern European painting for the first time care of the school’s Beaux Arts curriculum. Some Honarkadeh students staged rebellions against the prevailing pedagogy and Yektai was no exception, energetically arguing with a professor one day over his right to paint a cucumber red. He left school without graduating, in 1944, and headed to New York, where he took classes at the Art Students League and fatefully encountered Jackson Pollock’s work in an issue of LIFE magazine. His ultimate destination, though, was France, where he planned to study with the Cubist painter Andre Lhote.
Matine-Daftaryleft Iran even earlier, at 13, to study at Cheltenham Ladies College in the UK, where she indulged in theater and painting. At 18, she enrolled at the Slade, where her professors included Lucian Freud. Freud introduced her to the palette knife and may or may not have influenced her future work in other ways; the angularity that characterized the portraiture of Freud and his London School compatriots find echo in Matine-Daftary’s later portraits, which often feature striking geometries demarcated by the use of color.
Meanwhile, France was a disappointment for Yektai—its arts education stodgy and conservative. He returned to New York, deep in the throes of a new movement called Ab Ex, and began developing what would become his signature style: heavily impastoed, almost sculptural, canvases which took still lives, figures and landscapes as their point of departure—a legacy, one might suggest, of his classical arts education in Tehran. The work felt both familiar and new, kicking the quotidian into another dimension— formally, spiritually—while always teetering between figuration and abstraction, never giving in to either and defying the art historian’s persistent call for “purity.”
“Yektai,” the renowned poet John Ashbery wrote in 1961, “wants to render us conscious of our existence from second to second, of the joy of breathing, of the rapid changes of things.” Soon, he began to be counted among the Ab Exers and the New York School, to which he said, “I don’t like to be considered part of any group,” memorably insisting that his work was “stateless.” When his fellow artist Larry Rivers asked him if he’d ever deviate from still-lives and paint the likes of an airplane, he replied, “I want to paint an apple until it flies!”
All the while, Yektai maintained a vivid poetry practice; his most well-known poem, Falgoosh, an epic about an Iranian folk fortune telling tradition, extravagantly scrambles rhyme and meter—making it a touchstone in the history of modern Iranian poetry. A political parable, Falgoosh was staged at the avant-garde Shiraz Festival of the Arts in 1970 and continues to both bewilder and titillate new generations of readers.
Just as Yektai was habituating to life in America, Matine-Daftarymoved back to Tehran in the late 1950s and began teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts. She also began to make the work that she would come to be known for—flat brightly rendered canvases marked by a taut and deceptive simplicity. In their conjuring the inner lives of everyday objects, they occasionally evoke Japanese Shijo painting. About their flatness, there is much to say: like écriture plat, which served as an affront to affectation in literature, Matine-Daftary’s paintings can feel like a riposte to ornamentation in Persian painting. She tended toward people and still lives in her art, and yet to characterize her as a mere figurative painter would be misleading; as the artist Fereydoun Ave has noted, her core concern was “the abstract division of space.” Traditional ideas about pictorial space were jettisoned as she used blocks of color in both foreground and background to create new dimensionalities.
The exhibition at hand is an amuse-bouche, a provocation and an experiment, featuring rarely seen works by both artists, comprising landscapes, portraits, and still lives. Both armed with a classical education, both formalists of a sort, they each turned genre painting on its head—making it distinctly their own. Both Matine-Daftaryand Yektai pulled upon things close at hand—friends and fellow travelers, and of course, their immediate environment; Matine-Daftarywas prone to painting the stones (sang-chin), persimmons (khormaloo), and plane trees (derakht-e-chenar) around her North Tehran home, while Yektai often depicted an amalgam of the various topographies he had lived in and around, including that of the South Fork of Long Island, where he settled and spent decades making art of and about subjects as simple as a tomato plant. Notably, both artists resisted the call in Iranian modern art to address a national vernacular, most vividly manifest in what came to be known as the Saqqakhaneh movement. Both resisted being commodified as part of any group; both struck out on their own. Finally, both died in exile— Matine-Daftaryin Paris, in 2007, and Yektai in Long Island, in 2019.
So, strangers. The late sociologist George Simmel defined strangers as distinct from “outsiders” or “wanderers.” Strangers are at once close and distant, intimate and alien. In this way, Matine-Daftaryand Yektai are indeed strangers: impossible to reduce to tidy art historical designations. Perfect strangers, to each other and to traditional art histories, they meet here.
** Perfect Strangers would not have been possible without the support of the artists’ families: Suri Farman-Farmaian and the Estate of Manoucher Yektai in particular. Additional thanks to Ali Bakhtiari, Leila Moghtader, Alireza Fatehie, Ashkan Zahraei, and Karma.
Leyly Matine-Daftary (Iranian; b. 1937, Tehran, Iran—d. 2007, Paris, France; lived and worked in Paris and Tehran)
Manoucher Yektai (Iranian-American; b. 1921, Tehran, Iran—d. 2019, New York, USA; lived and worked in New York)
ThisWeekendRoom are pleased to present Drink Water, the solo exhibition by Berlin and Seoul-based artist Jinhee Kim. Kim uses the everyday act of drinking water as a metaphor to contemplate the meaning of identity beyond distinctions of race, culture, gender, and language. Her paintings depict figures caught in seemingly repetitive and mundane routines: a face peering out from a crowd, a figure resting and leaning over a table next to an empty glass, and a seated figure gazing out a café window. However, a closer look reveals that these actions are not universally experienced in the same way. Instead, they are shaped by geographical, political, and social contexts unique to each individual. What may appear trivial to some could mean a great deal to others—a dream they have to fight for or reclaim.
Kim's experience living abroad has shown her that these moments of perceived differences are rarely rooted in some memorable event. It is in the ordinary aspects of daily life—having breakfast, buying water at the supermarket, drinking coffee with a friend, or walking around in the neighborhood—that she senses the differences between herself and her surroundings. These daily routines reflect deeply ingrained values of each individual and, in turn, highlight the diverse ways people live their lives.
Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present Astral Sea, an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Teresita Fernández. Featuring a series of glazed ceramic pieces and new sculptural paper panels, Astral Sea extends the artist’s interests in the confluence points of the cosmos, land, and water, as seen through the lens of an embodied sculptural landscape.
Throughout her practice, Fernández has concerned herself with the ambulatory viewer, situating her work so that it is brought to life by the individual’s movement around the gallery. With these shifting vantage points, people’s reflections move across the surfaces of the work; depending on one’s location, the artist’s materials either reveal or conceal themselves from view. This physical engagement is akin to how we wayfind in or navigate the world around us, making evident our connectivity to the universe—the stars, tides, and slow time of geology. In this way, Fernández’s works embody the phrase: “Nothing rests; Everything moves; Everything vibrates.”
‘Tbilisi Independent’ highlights five young, female-run galleries from the Georgian capital: E.A Shared Space, Gallery 4710, The Why Not Gallery, MAUDI, and CH64 Gallery. Acollaboration with Reach Art Visual, the exhibition builds its narrative around two central pillars in the history of Georgian abstraction: Alexander Bandzeladze (1927–1992) and Tamuna Sirbiladze (1971–2016), including artists such as Lia Bagrationi, Mariana Chkonia and Sopho Kobidze.
The show then brings the story into the present day with outstanding figurative works by contemporary artists Anuk Beluga, Saba Gorgodze, Merab Gugunashvili, Gvantsa Jishkariani, Giorgi Khaniashvili, Niniko Morbedadze, Tamar Nadiradze, Temple Pharmacy and Nata Varazi. The result is an exhibition that offers a compelling insight into Georgian art and culture, and the emerging voices in the country amid rising political and social upheaval.
Curated by drawing platform Trois Crayons, and part of London Art Week 2024, this exhibition brings together 17 international dealers who specialize in works on paper, including Didier Aaron and Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, and Nathalie Motte Masselink.
The selection of 150 drawings spans old masters, iconic 20th-century pieces and contemporary works. Artists include Lorenzo Bernini, Pierre Bonnard, Simon Bussy, Battista Franco, Thomas Gainsborough, Domenico Gnoli, Guercino, Gwen John, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, Andy Warhol, Jean-Antoine Watteau and more.
This month, three exhibitions open in Frieze's Mayfair space, including a solo show by Rameshwar Broota, an artist-led reflection on Edward Burra and Fathi Hassan's response to The Sunderland Collection
This month, Frieze’s Mayfair gallery hosts three shows, including a dual exhibition by Tamara K.E. and Gia Edzgveradze and the first solo presentation of photographer Adam Rouhana
The Sunderland Collection, a private collection of rare antique world and celestial maps, is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition of its newly launched Art Programme: Fathi Hassan: Shifting Sands.
Born in Cairo in 1957 to Egyptian and Nubian parents, Fathi Hassan gained prominence in the 1980s. In 1988, he became one of the first artists of African heritage to be included in the Venice Art Biennale. Having moved from Egypt in his early twenties to study at the Naples Art School, Hassan spent decades living and working in Italy. Now based in Edinburgh, he works across photography, painting, drawing, and installation. Hassan graduated from the Naples Art School in 1984 and became an active participant in an avant-garde art scene which attracted international figures including Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol and Hermann Nitsch. It was a time of political upheaval and artistic experimentation, with a thriving dance music scene, in which Hassan’s practice developed and was influenced by his work as a screen and stage actor and set designer.
During his immersion in The Sunderland Collection, Hassan contemplated the global confluence of ideas and peoples, the tides of cultural encounters, and his own personal history. Moving back and forth in time, the body of work that he has produced comprises a visually arresting, richly coloured tapestry of memories, concepts, historical figures, and Hassan’s distinctive artistic expression.
Hassan pictures an imagined realm where musicians, writers, entertainers and scientists converge, whose lives and work have not only inspired him, but have had a profound, transnational influence on global thought and culture. This series, entitled Trail Blazers, features revolutionaries and Modernists Virginia Woolf and Charlie Chaplin, alongside activists who changed the course of history, such as Muhammad Ali. Among the ancient cultural figures who inspired Hassan are Muhammad al-Idrisi and Averroes. Timelines and borders collapse and intertwine, with the selected cast of characters forming a bridge between geographies, eras and identities. The series uses objects from The Sunderland Collection as a backdrop or mirror for these historic cultural figures, whom Hassan envisions coming together in an imagined space.
While exploring The Sunderland Collection, Hassan also drew heavily on his personal history and the journeys on which his life has taken him. The exhibition will present mixed-media works combining collage, print, pencil, and gouache that depict autobiographical components of Hassan’s lived and artistic journeys, Italian landscapes, and motifs that the artist has consistently incorporated into his practice, such as animals from his childhood, a crescent moon and Nubian warriors. The pieces reflect on the flooding of Nubia in 1952 which displaced the artist’s family five years before his birth, with symbols including the traditional boats (felucca) which were used to navigate the Nile, and which have come to represent the displacement of people by the flood.
Alongside the new works being presented, the artist has selected a range of works on paper and two photographs from different stages of his career, which speak to his personal journey and identity, and which add to the conversation that he begins with the map-based works.
John Swarbrooke Fine Art is pleased to present Macabre: Edward Burra to Paula Rego, an exhibition inspired by Sussex artist Edward Burra’s lifetime fascination with the macabre. The otherworldliness of Burra’s pictures provides the starting point for this exhibition, which features a century of artworks exploring the theme of the macabre. The exhibition includes paintings, works on paper and sculpture by Edward Burra, John Minton, Graham Sutherland, Elizabeth Frink, Michael Ayrton, Grayson Perry, Damien Hirst and Paula Rego, amongst others.
Vadehra Art Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent works by post-modernist painter and sculptor Rameshwar Broota. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in London.
Currently working in his revelatory period of abstraction, laborious means of layering paint and scraping the surface with a blade to create unique variations Rameshwar Broota is drawn to exploring an inner journey of the human condition motivated by deep self-awareness. His quintessentially in tone often leads to patterns and images emerging serendipitously in his compositions, which sometimes appear as a chaotic conclusion or genesis of time, technology, nature and mankind itself.
Alongside Broota’s recent paintings, the exhibition also features a suite of multi-dimensional resin sculptures, bearing calligraphic texts, found objects and varying materials. The glass-like opacity of the work prompts a magnified examination of the marks and layers held inside, becoming a kind of relic that invites repeated and concentrated viewing. The practice and conscientiousness of the artist are steeped in an exploration of the fractures and friction of change and development that remain political in the real world, philosophical in the celestial phase and characteristically concurrent.
This spring, Frieze No.9 Cork Street sees a full-gallery takeover by Matt Carey-Williams, whose curatorial project ‘Bump’ features 21 painters from around the world
In a two-week exhibition at the gallery, the creator of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse responds to Paul Simon’s latest album Seven Psalms with seven new sketches
Counterpoints Arts, Dover Arts Development, Shubbak Festival and Frieze No.9 Cork Street are pleased to present I’d search forever, I want to remember, a multidisciplinary body of work by artist Tamara Al-Mashouk that asks if matter and place remember the way our bodies do.
The exhibition features a wave machine that contains water from the English Channel brought in as witness, a three-channel film that explores the psyche of a disused detention centre in Dover and a photographic series that engages with the shoreline as a site of poetic multiplicity.
The work presented is the result of a gathering of artists thinking and organising together. Manon Schwich, Sami El-Enany, Parker Heyl, Angus Frost, Lorella Bianco, Fadi Giha and Patricia Doors join Al-Mashouk in considering sites of solace within embodied experiences of hyper-politicisation.
