The Iranian artist creates work that moves beyond cliché to create a new visual language about existing freely in the world.
Hrag Vartanian |
WALTHAM, Mass. — I remember when I was a teen one of the things I loved doing was thumbing through large art books full of Persian miniatures from the Timurid or Safavid eras. They captured the material realities of past worlds with their recognizable but stylized flowers and somewhat formal figures rendered in stately or warrior poses, all engulfed by an explosion of line and design that covered every facet of space the artist made plain.
That feeling of wonder washed over me at Arghavan Khosravi’s solo exhibition at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. In these predominantly wall works, Khosravi creates art that directly engages with the illusionism of traditional Persian manuscript illumination but infuses it with the feminist aesthetics of Marisol Escobar. With the latter Khosravi shares a love of what I’d describe as mimicry (paging Luce Irigaray), often echoing or copying historical items to transform them or exploit their weaknesses. In Khosravi’s art that means the juxtapositions often reveal the limits of singular images and they are always tending toward the artistic power of hybridity. She’s as much in dialogue with minimalist sculpture and second-wave feminist art as she is with museum-style displays or even the clutter of junk and antique shops.
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