Nasim Hantehzadeh

Frieze LA

Beverly Hills, Los Angeles

February 17-20, 2022

The Pit is pleased to present a solo booth by Nasim Hantehzadeh. Hantehzadeh here, for the first time, exhibits oil pastel and graphite pencil drawings alongside her paintings to offer insight into creative processes that carefully balance design and improvisation to render pictographic images that undulate between memory, recognition, and subconscious—nearly surreal— abstraction.

While the visual grammar in these works feels biomorphic, Hantehzadeh prefers the term “metamorphic” to better reflect her liminal, geological layers of connotative resemblance. Botanical forms, cellular spikes and pods, nonbinary anatomy (particularly genderless genitalia), and arrangements indirectly inspired by ancient textile and ornamentation give Hantehzadeh’s works sedimentary feeling, as if they’re clairvoyant reliquaries. Curvy, brightly colored paisleys; toothed, spiky erections and stems; and cosmic, floral blasts steer viewers’ eyes around and through holes and orifices that dot her compositions like fertile obstacle courses. Holes, fissures, slits, punctures, and other juicy cavities bring the third dimension onto her 2D planes; compositions and pigmentation skew towards the earthy, mineral, and primordial to evoke visual matrices that push through time. While buzzing activity in the imaging recalls Modernist histories of capturing movement (i.e. Simultaneity), Hantehzadeh hints at cultural cues from her Iranian-American identity. Dazzling repetition of arabesques and other organic geometry used in mosque architecture; energetic, loving gestures inherent to Arabic calligraphy — these are sources of beauty that inspire her. However, her works (often through titling) embed political critiques of corrupt cultural histories she abhors, particularly crimes against women. Analyzing identity formation is central to Hantehzadeh’s practice, and she welcomes conversation about how memories inform and mold history, experience, and collectivity.

These effects and aesthetics are in keeping with Hantehzadeh’s efforts to uplift alterity while destabilizing hierarchies, especially anthropocentric and patriarchal hegemonies. Her works are highly emotional in efforts to sincerely reflect inner states of perception and being. They equally champion plant and animal forms with those denoting humanity. Through warm, playful poetics, these artworks are texturally alive, like coral reefs or weavings; haptic line and shape invites viewers into Hantehzadeh’s richly contemplative firmament in which everything is summoned, explored, and rewarded.