NEGAR AHKAMI

NEGAR AHKAMI

Negar Ahkami's work negotiates Iranian and Western art influences, on Ahkami's own terms. Ahkami has created an aesthetic language out of Iran's contradictions: between its exquisiteness and failures, its complexity and cartoonishness, its humanity and brutality. Her relief-like, glittery paintings conjure Iran's elaborate tile-work and patterned visual traditions. But Ahkami takes permission from Western expressionists and American popular culture to make a version of Persian art that is visceral, neurotic and free. She embraces a bold hand and unleashed imagination, and rejects the poetic perfection and repressed authorship of traditional Persian-Islamic art. Her work over the years has engaged Orientalist and Occidentalist impulses in popular culture, with an eye that is at once critical and embracing.

Negar Ahkami was born in 1971 in Baltimore, Maryland and raised in Clifton, New Jersey. She received a BA in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures from Columbia University in 1992, and an MFA from School of Visual Arts in 2006. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2004. She received a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace grant in 2006-2007, and participated in the Jentel Artist Residency Program in Wyoming in 2003. Ahkami's work was exhibited in two solo exhibitions, at LMAK Projects in Williambsurg, Brooklyn in 2007, and at Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery in 2009. She participated in a two-person exhibition with Kyung Jeon in 2008 at Miki Wick Kim Gallery in Zurich. Her work has been seen in group exhibitions at the New Britain Museum of American Art (where her work is part of the permanent collection), the Chelsea Museum of Art ("Iran Inside Out"), the Bronx Museum of Art, Leila Heller Gallery, Stefan Stux Gallery and Kravets Wehby Gallery.

Born 1971, Baltimore, Maryland
Lives and works in New York City

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