(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist)

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Manoucher Yektai

Karma, 19 September to 1 November

Iranian-born poet and painter Manoucher Yektai is presenting a survey of early paintings organized by curator and writer Negar Azimi. Focusing on the first decades of Yektai’s career, the exhibition offers access to the artist’s early experimentation with genre, color, shape, and form—foundational elements that illuminate the development of his mature practice. In the 1940s, Yektai left Tehran to study in Paris with André Lhote before relocating to New York, where he became part of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists and developed close ties with artists such as de Kooning, Rothko, and Pollock These early paintings, most of which have never been exhibited before, manage to complicate hitherto entrenched narratives around both AbEx and Yektai’s artistic trajectories at large.