I think part of the fascination I have with the art making process is that you don’t know where you are going, so it’s probably best to say that I am responding to the unknown, looking for the undiscovered.

(Farhad Moshiri)

Perrotin New York is pleased to present “Snow Forest”, the fifth solo exhibition at the gallery by Farhad Moshiri, internationally renowned for his innovative approach in the Neo-Pop style. The new body of works of the Iranian artist comes from old photographs of snowy trees shot by the artist several years ago in a forest in Iran. Moshiri is an ardent collector: he gathers all kinds of found forms and images, arranged according to shared iconographic principles.

His new series deals with a certain frictional relationship with abstraction and color. Embroidered with beads and pearls, these images become contrasted landscapes, barely recognizable. They can evoke Mondrian’s Silver Tree from the 1910s, the nature in black and white paving the way to abstraction. Incorporating elements such as embroidery, crystals and beads, the photographs become highly textured and sculptural. Setting up a new vocabulary in Moshiri’s work, “Snow Forest” articulates a different approach of ornamentation and imagery.

“Equally at ease with so-called high-brow and low-brow references, including Pop art, conceptual art, comics, advertising, classic portraiture, and religious iconography, Moshiri’s composite language is primarily a reflection of the different cultures that defined his growth as a human being and as an artist—a conflict that is still very much present today in contemporary Iran’s society, where Moshiri resides, and where the pillars that supported a secular civilization are subjected to daily reviews, questions and contaminations dictated by the inevitable progress of modern life. This factor, coupled with Moshiri’s attendance of the California Institute of Arts in the mid-1980s, where he first came into contact with other major unorthodox reality makers like Michael Asher, John Baldessarri and Don Buchla, and the opportunity