Keywan Tafteh

Recent Dual Exhibition:

May 20 - June 17, 2023. Dual Exhibition.

No Plateaus

Keywan Tafteh, Daniela Soberman

Documentation:
+ Checklist
+ Catalogue

Bio

Keywan Tafteh is a Russian/Iranian/American artist based in Los Angeles. Having completed his studio arts education at UC San Diego in 2021, his interdisciplinary work has been shown through public commissions, solo shows, and group shows in Southern California. He has also participated in international artist residencies in Berlin and France. His recent solo exhibitions include "Glass Eye (Nazar)” at Adams Hill Park, Funded by the Glendale Arts & Culture Commission (2022), and “Walled Windows” at Community Contemporary in Los Angeles (2022).

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Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is presenting radically re-imaginative surface works by Keywan Tafteh as part of the dual exhibition No Plateaus. Tafteh’s queering and querying of the space of painting through cuts, pastes, and seams of materials and material bodies reshapes the possibilities of the gaze as his pieces ravel around the maze-like structures produced by Daniela Soberman.

Tafteh rides the dividing lines of his cultural identity as a queer Russian/Iranian/American, tracing these divisions in the fractured planes and broken borders of his paintings.

The surfaces on which Tafteh’s figurative, expressive paintings are produced are often interruptively collaged, and sometimes sliced and subsequently sutured-back-together with staples left visible to the viewer. These transgressive events usurp the normative boundaries of the surface or body of the artwork and diffuse the squared-straight of the ninety-degree gaze through the irregular, unpredictable, and queer limits of a masculine mode of embodiment that has broken free from a pre-determined frame.

Throughout Tafteh’s work, the painted figure(s) and the material body of the work are never fully separated, and are always intimately intertwined. In Contortionist, a folding and distorting of both the figural and material body is acted out on the level of the gaze (as a body part), and on the level of the surface (as part of a body): cut, skewed, and stapled-together. Dimensionally, the work flattens and expands simultaneously, folding the projective plane into the material surface of the work’s sculptural body.

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Exhibitions with the Gallery:

- September 30 - October 4. Benefit Salon.

Benefit 2023 | Chords2Cure
Emma Gray, Daniela Soberman, Ari Salka, Erica Everage, Kento Saisho, Keywan Tafteh, Sinclair Vicisitud, Suwichada Busamrong-Press, Saun Santipreecha, Rudik Ovsepyan, objet A.D, Chris Reisig & Leeza Taylor.
Documentation:
+ Checklist
Recordings
+ Exhibition Videos
Press:
+ This Week’s Must-See Art (Curate LA: September 28-August 4, 2023).

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- May 20 - June 17, 2023. Dual Exhibition.