Shahryar Nashat is a dynamic artist who creates videos, sculptures, installations and other artworks in which the human body and its depictions play a central role.
Read MoreOften addressing representations of the body in art history and mainstream culture, Nashat is interested in conventions of presentation and mediation, paying special attention to pedestals, supports and framing and regularly treating them as integral parts of his work. Oscillating between corporeality and incorporeality, desire and death, the themes that Nashat explores in his work reflect on the vulnerability of the human body and our desire for intimacy in a moment when technologies incite fragmentation and distance.
Born in 1975 in Geneva, Switzerland, Nashat received his formal art education from Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Geneva between 1995 and 2000 and went on to complete a one-year artist residency programme at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam in 2001. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.
Beneath a veil of abjection, humour and eroticism, Shahryar Nashat stages multisensory encounters between images and objects, constructing a narrative between viewers and the figures that appear in his work. In doing so, he invokes feelings of intimacy and desire with a subject that is implied through multiple mediums, but never fully materialises.
In many of his installations, sculptural abstraction is counterbalanced with video and Nashat frequently makes alterations to the lighting and architecture within an exhibition space, colouring the windows with a characteristic pink film-tint that forms a regular part of his practice.
Going beyond the limits of the skin, Nashat investigates the body and its image as a site of fragmentation and yearning. For his 'meat objects', like his Bone In (2019–2020) series of sculptures, the artist treats stone and synthetic polymer as surrogates for flesh, casting great hunks of meat in resin and strapping them to boards with clingfilm. Each one bears a playful pick-up line – 'This could be us, but you're playin'; 'Will you text me?' – that implore (even beg) the viewer for attention.
In Nashat's 10-minute digital video, Hustle in Hand (2014), we observe secret negotiations taking place between two characters, nothing but their torsos visible in the frame. In another scene, a man displays an abrasion on his arm, dark scabs in stark contrast with his pale skin. Wounds, the vulnerable body and challenging desire with disgust are recurrent themes in Nashat's work. By representing only fragments of the body, extreme close-ups or lesions in the skin, the artist subverts the privilege of the wholesome and homogeneous body in mainstream cultural representation and opens the door for desire and projection.
Shahryar Nashat has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions. Selected and recent solo exhibitions include: Happier Than Ever, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2022); Hounds of Love, Gladstone Gallery, New York, USA (2022); Force Life (with Adam Linder), The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, USA (2020); and Keep Begging, Swiss Institute, New York, USA (2019).
Group exhibitions include: And your flesh as my greatest poem, Antenna Space, Shanghai, China (2022); Pathologically Social, O-Town House, Los Angeles, USA (2021); Pictures in Motion, Kunst Museum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland (2020); and SI ONSITE, Swiss Institute, New York, USA (2018).
Nashat's work is in the permanent collections of a number of museums worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (GAMeC), Turin, Italy; Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, Switzerland; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Shahryar Nashat's website can be found here.
Articles about Shahryar Nashat's work and practice have been published in a number of major publications, including Art-Agenda, Artforum, frieze, Purple Magazine, and Art in America.
Fay Janet Jackson | Ocula | 2022
