“Beginnings”

The late Iranian American artist’s exhibition exemplified how he expanded the Eurocentric parameters of abstraction.

Installation view of MANOUCHER YEKTAI’s “Beginnings” at Karma Gallery, Los Angeles, 2025. Courtesy Karma Gallery and ArtAsiaPacific.

by Liz Hirsch, ArtAsiaPacific

“Beginnings,” curated by writer and editor Negar Azimi, was the most comprehensive survey to date of early works by Manoucher Yektai (1921–2019), an artist who belonged to the New York School yet never quite fit its mythology of white male heroism. The Iranian-born painter trained in Tehran, New York, and Paris before settling in New York by 1948, bringing a sensibility shaped by multiple European modernisms (Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism) alongside his native cultural heritage. Unfolding chronologically across two large rooms, the exhibition featured paintings made between 1948 and 1969 that exemplify how Yektai transformed Surrealist biomorphism into a muscular material language. What emerged was the story of an artist expanding the Eurocentric parameters of abstraction in the US. 

Untitled (1948), with whites and blues punctuated by sienna, greeted visitors near the entrance. The curving forms depicted in this work are edged with tooth-like projections. Though the white patches appear smooth at first, a closer look reveals a textured, striated surface, recalling a fine comb that has passed through wet plaster. Hung nearby was Untitled (1949), a smaller, kite-shaped tableau with compressed swirls of purple, orange, and black, reminiscent of intricately patterned Persian carpets as well as the fluid, amoeba-like imagery of Joan Miró and Jean Arp. Two decades before American artists like Ellsworth Kelly or Frank Stella produced their atypically shaped canvases, Yektai treated the edge as a charged, sculptural boundary.

Noble/Savage

Ali Banisadr’s Mesmerizing Paintings Make Sense of Chaos 

Ali Banisadr, installation view of “Noble/Savage” at Olney Gleason, 2025. Photo by Charlie Rubin. Courtesy of Olney Gleason and Artsy.

by Maxwell Rabb, Artsy

Ali Banisadr’s childhood in Tehran was marked by violence. At the start of the Iran-Iraq War, which broke out in 1980, he was only four years old. “As a child, I was trying to understand this chaos,” he told me during a recent visit to his studio in Brooklyn. “The most abstract thing to make sense of for me was living in Iran during the war.”

That sensory overload became the foundation of his visual language, informed in large part by the artist’s synesthesia. Making art, he told me, was a way to impose order on disorder—to “make sense out of the sounds,” he explained. Four decades later, Banisadr, now 49, lives in New York, where he continues to try to understand the world through his hyperactive compositions. Layers of rough, energetic brushstrokes collide with flashes of color that hum against each other, evoking a similar dissonance to what he experienced as a child. His canvases are visually overwhelming yet remain governed by some internal logic, like a piece of music.

This push-pull relationship between order and chaos lies at the center of “Noble/Savage,” Banisadr’s solo show inaugurating New York’s Olney Gleason gallery (previously known as Kasmin). The show brings together the Iranian American artist’s newest paintings and a suite of bronze sculptures, his first in this medium. This body of work extends Banisadr’s lifelong pursuit of making sense of confusing, often contradictory human experiences.

In 1988, his family relocated from Tehran to San Francisco, where he started making graffiti among a community of artists. There, he was inspired by other artists using the medium to create sociopolitical critique. For example, in our interview, Banisadr name-checked Barry McGee, who “was making commentary about things that you were seeing in San Francisco,” referring to the gentrification of the city over the years.

nameless

Nairy Baghramian at WIELS — nameless brings together several previously unseen bodies of work in dialogue with the post-industrial architecture.

Installation view, photography by Eline Willaert. Courtesy SLEEK.

by Nisha Merit, SLEEK

Iranian-born, Berlin-based artist Nairy Baghramian has spent decades forging a singular sculptural vocabulary that draws from dance, theatre, fashion, architecture and the history of sculpture itself. Since 1984 she has lived and worked in Berlin, developing a practice that moves across sculpture, spatial installation, photography, and drawing.

Her exhibition nameless, which opened last Saturday at WIELS in Brussels, examines the forces that shape the displacement and statelessness of objects. Baghramian reflects on the precarious condition of works that exist perpetually “in between” – liberated from fixed classifications or limiting environments. She conjures an urgency for a sculptural mode of existence outside the rigidity of language, codes, and names – a concern that resonates well beyond today’s geopolitical crises. For Baghramian, sculpture is not simply an object but an expanded way of understanding the world.