INSTITUTE OF
ARAB & ISLAMIC ART
Reza Farkhondeh - 99¢
The Institute of Arab and Islamic Art (IAIA) is honored to present the first institutional exhibition of Reza Farkhondeh in the United States.
IAIA is pleased to present 99¢, the first institutional solo exhibition of Reza Farkhondeh in the United States. This exhibition brings together a series of oil paintings and works on paper, produced between 1991 and 1996, highlighting Farkhondeh's series '99 Cent Objects'. Born in Iran, Farkhondeh studied economics at the University of Tehran before pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at Villa Arson in Nice, France. During a visit to the United States in 1991, Farkhondeh became captivated by the 99-cent toys mass-produced in China that populated the country's consumer landscape. Farkhondeh approaches these objects from outside of the culture that produced them, exposing what familiarity had made invisible to those within: that to give a child a toy soldier is to begin their education. The formal grandeur of these paintings — the rendering of molded plastic, the scale — arrests this invisibility.
Tracing the relationship between play and propaganda, Farkhondeh reveals the ideologies inherent to these ostensibly benign objects. These toys — weapons, vehicles, and hyper-feminine dolls — constitute the first symbolic vocabulary handed to children in the West, exposing the cracks in America's veneer. Stamped 'Made in China,' the toys Farkhondeh paints are simultaneously artifacts of American militarist culture and products of the accelerating global supply chain of the 1990s. Farkhondeh's paintings stand as a prescient meditation on a reliance that has only deepened. By granting the slow and meticulous process of oil painting to objects designed for rapid consumption, Farkhondeh confers upon them a permanence they were never built to hold.
Fascinated by the glitches and errors of mass production — the seam where the mold split, the color slightly off, the proportions not quite resolving — Farkhondeh imbues each toy with the isolated dignity of a portrait subject. These objects are often replicas of expensive toys, mass-produced at speed for those who cannot afford the original; the flaw is not incidental, it is the class argument made visible in plastic. Rendered with impassioned precision, at a scale that confronts the viewer, Farkhondeh evokes the interior experience of childhood, when these disposable objects were encased in a patina of preciousness. Resisting Pop Art's irony and refusing institutional critique's distance, Farkhondeh insists on painting's oldest power: to make ordinary things impossible to look away from.
Reza Farkhondeh: Born in Iran, Reza Farkhondeh lives and works in New York. He studied Economics before completing a BFA in painting at the Beaux-Arts de Dijon and an MFA in video and short film at the Villa Arson in Nice. He also studied at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris. Farkhondeh has maintained a long-standing collaboration with artist Ghada Amer, producing works in which the boundaries of authorship dissolve — pieces begun by one artist and completed by the other, image and gesture entering into dynamic conversation. He has exhibited at the 4th International Istanbul Biennale and held solo shows at Rizzo Gallery, Paris, Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore, Kukje Gallery, Seoul, Tina Kim, New York and Pace Prints, New York.