Amir Nikravan‘s exhibition “Rational Design,” on view now at Nathalie Karg gallery in New York, is the third exhibition we’ve featured in the past week exploring the relationship between painting and sculpture. But of all the artists we’ve written about, Nikravan seems the most interested in collapsing that boundary entirely. In his last exhibition, “Merge Visible,” so-named for the Photoshop function that flattens an image’s layers into a single canvas, Nikravan made works that appeared textural but were in fact completely flat — the result of a process by which the artist vacuum-wraps layers of paint, concrete, and rocks onto a wood substrate, covers the whole thing in fabric, spray-paints the resulting topography, then removes the fabric and mounts the now flat canvas onto a sheet of thin aluminum. His latest works take as their starting point a decorative, lozenge-shaped, architectural element from an Edward Durell Stone building in Pasadena; Nikravan divides the shape into modular quadrants, shuffles them, and reassembles them into more abstract works. These pieces are more obviously sculptural, and they’ve been likened to Donald Judd’s Specific Objects. But while Judd’s were comprised of repeated geometric forms that had been made by a machine, Nikravan’s hand is more obvious in these works. See for yourself in person before the show closes on October 15.
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