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MARIANNE BOESKY - Andisheh Avini

1,164 views · Published 18 January 2014 · 4:15 · Indexed 6 October 2026

Channel: NYC GALLERY OPENINGS · 2014 · Entertainment

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Andisheh Avini
Solo Exhibition

January 16th - February 15th
Opening:  January 16th 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by 
Andisheh Avini. This soloexhibition will be the artist's first since joining the 
gallery in 2012. It will run from January 16 through February 15, 2014 at 
509 West 24th Street.

Andisheh Avini uses the subjective experience of his Iranian heritage as a 
platform from which to explore more collective notions of memory and 
the significance of imagery. For his first solo exhibition at Marianne 
Boesky Gallery, Avini will present a new series of large-scale silkscreen 
paintings depicting the intense gaze of Khomeini. Here, Avini has reduced 
the appropriated image of the revolutionary figure to his eyes, and in 
doing so, uproots the image's cultural specificity. Mysterious, menacing, 
and lofty, the series alludes to a child's impressions of the world around 
him - gained both through empirical interaction and the mediation of 
popular culture. In turn, these images inspire the adult recollection of 
those early impressions.

In the main gallery, Avini will present new marquetry paintings, works in 
which the artist continues his interest in appropriation and aesthetic 
intervention. Handmade in Iran, the panels that Avini uses as the support 
for these works are made to order, and their geometric designs are a 
highly recognizable and quotidian feature of Iranian culture. By painting 
over them, Avini uses the tight patterning and rigid, ageold tradition of 
these panels as a way to explore the liberated, gestural potential of 
painting. This visual interaction further suggests the artist's own 
relationship to his cultural heritage and personal history, linked as it is to 
an historical moment whose regulated visual proscriptions are antithetical 
to the aesthetic possibilities within his life in New York. Sourcing bits and 
pieces of simple images - the curve of a lock of hair, for instance - Avini 
reduces them to their essential forms until their origin is diluted and the 
fluidity of paint is emphasized. In these palimpsestic hybrids, Avini's 
overwriting obstructs and complicates the language of the traditional 
designs, both in a visual and conceptual sense.

Avini will also use another "readymade" material as a support for his 
painted compositions: carpets. Here, Avini mines both the banality and 
textured warmth of the non-art support material to further disrupt 
traditional notions of the painterly practice. Additionally, the exhibition will 
present paintings that feature a new motif in Avini's work: the lush and 
coveted patterning of the peacock feather, a classic example of naturally 
occurring symmetry and formal beauty. In this way, Avini's cultural and 
aesthetic investigation enters into the larger art historical discussion 
regarding the tension between craft, design, and "high art," as well as 
participating in the critical reassessment of images that has occupied 
Western artists since modernism.
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Andisheh Avini was born in 1974 in New York. Educated at Hunter College 
in New York, he has shown consistently in solo and group exhibitions 
since 2002, including locations in New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, Basel, 
Madrid and Paris. He currently lives and works in New York.


Music by:
Chill Carrier - A New Day

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