Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce A Thousand Folds—an exhibition of new works by London-based Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary. Known for her painting, sculpture, and animation that seek to challenge viewers’ perceptions of time, space, and materiality, Houshiary’s works often engage opposing ideas and states of being, including transparency and opacity, sound and silence, surface and depth, presence and absence. The title of this exhibition is inspired from the word thousandfold to suggest an experience that is a conduit for understanding the world around us. Each work unveils fissures or folds as spaces that inhabit our dreams, imaginations, and perceptions. Houshiary approaches the intangible and evanescent, articulating a metaphysical reality that lies beyond mere form and surface.

Like Mark Rothko, who once said that his color field paintings should be viewed from a distance of 18 inches in order to dominate the viewer’s field of vision, Houshiary’s work rewards a similar mode of looking. From a distance, her paintings are reminiscent of a cosmos or the universe, but as the viewer draws closer the meticulousness, detail, and hidden Arabic letters that make up her amorphous forms begin to unfold. Contradiction and paradox are at the core of her work, and the wide universe within her field of inquiry is often met with complexity. The Arabic words embedded in her compositions are a juxtaposition of the opposing phrases “I am” and “I am not,” oscillating freely between focused and unfocused states, where the meaning of our existence becomes literally superfluous and lost in her imagined cosmos.