Impeccable timing on this exhibit. Randy Kennedy for the Times: It takes very little time to get a sense of the spirit animating an ambitious show of Iranian and Iranian-American artists that opened on Friday at the Chelsea Art Museum.
As you walk in, the first room you see is sardonically titled “In Search of the Axis of Evil.” And in another section not far away, a bright, Photoshopped self-portrait of the young Tehran artist Vahid Sharifian shows him, with a big Afro and ’70s sideburns, in alarmingly intimate contact with a bored-looking lion. (The lion was one of the emblems of the Iranian monarchy before the Islamic Revolution.)
“Vahid is like the Jeff Koons of Iran,” said Sam Bardaouil, one of the exhibition’s curators, looking over other photographs of Mr. Sharifian — boxing with a stallion, leading a herd of reindeer through a sleek kitchen and blowing flames from his mouth at a bald eagle. “It’s hilarious and strange in a powerful way.” And fully intended, he added, to grab the attention of Americans who probably have a hard time envisioning a Koonsian temperament at work in Tehran — particularly these days.
[Read on]
