Negar Ahkami

My art of the last 20 years has engaged and satirized our cartoonish stereotypes of faraway people and places, and our notions of the exotic. My work also responds to unacknowledged global appropriation of the art of Iran and its neighbors —a region often skipped over or lumped together, despite its vast cultural influence.

My art is intentionally maximalist, like Iran’s richly patterned art and its flamboyant humanity from which I draw major inspiration. I take cues from Persian art’s symbolic approach, with an authentic symbolic vocabulary of my own that springboards from art history and pop culture. In lieu of Persian art’s masterful precision and exquisite poetry, my work emphasizes an expressive hand and pushes patterns towards cacophony and imbalance to create dizzying movement and emotional expression. Such dynamism and raw feeling are central concerns for me.

In person, my paintings are visually alive, with shimmering, bas-relief surfaces inspired by Iranian lusterware ceramics. Viewers also find similarities in my work to Chinese Blue and White ceramics, Majolica, Medieval European art, and Matisse. These other visual histories echoed in my art drew, in part, from precedents established by Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. My use of jewel-like ornamentation is, by design, intended to celebrate global connectivity and points of intersection, and to resist erasure.