Shiva Ahmadi

Shiva Ahmadi’s works occupy an uneasy psycho-visual space: at once meticulous and loose, playful and somber, mythical yet very much dealing with the real. Much of her paintings are on paper, but also aquaboard: a rigid surface best suited for her gouache, watercolor, and ink applications. Her grounds are light earthy washes, upon which she builds up degrees of opacity: most opaque is inevitably the color red, generously applied to the point of caking and crackling. The last layer is the most delicate: ornate floral patterns painstakingly applied with metallic gold ink. Relying heavily on the traditions of miniature painting, she has created an allegorical realm where faceless tyrants and religious authorities sit on ornate gilded thrones while subservient minions bow to them. Sometimes the tyrants seem messianic, with a veil covering their faces and flames behind their heads, some of them are the guardians of nuclear reactors, which float on clouds. The minions are often festive buffoons, monkeys and dogs: they kiss feet, they juggle grenades and might even be restrained by leashes. Her painterly bag of tricks (loose splatter vs tight rendering etc), her intriguing iconography, and the specificity of the geopolitics referenced, make Ahmadi’s work at once lush and seductive but ultimately destabilizing and uneasy. This malaise is the artist’s inherently critical stance towards power, be it the dictatorial authority of the worlds she left behind in her native Iran, or the more veiled forms of so-called soft and democratic authorities exercised upon her in her current American context.