Morgan Fisher, ( ), 2003, Maureen Paley, London, UK

In New York, Leila Heller Gallery and Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art have collaborated to stage a tribute exhibition in honor of the recently deceased Iranian artist Farideh Lashai. The artist was celebrated for her influence on the aesthetic construction of Middle Eastern Contemporary Art, and for her fantasized paintings and videos that gave a transient nature to ideas of reality, time, and space. By layering painting with video and sound, the artist used visual markers of the past and present to comment on modern day Iran. In an installation presented at Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art entitled When I count, there are only you…But when I look, there is only a shadow (2013), the artist created etchings inspired by Francisco de Goya (Spanish, 1746–1828) as a backdrop to her film installation El Amal (2011). The juxtaposition of the universal theme of war presented in traditional media along with new technology sheds a nostalgic light on the violent condition of modern Iran. At Leila Heller Gallery, the exhibition also highlights Lashai’s use of layered painting and film in its presentation of five works from the series Rabbit in Wonderland. Once again, by layering these diverse media, the artist references the political landscape and ideologies of Iran in the 20th century, while also keeping at the forefront the beautiful detail that now typifies Middle Eastern Contemporary Art.

Farideh Lashai, I Come From the Land of Ideology, (video still), 2010–2012, Leila Heller Gallery, New York, NY

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