Frieze New York 2025 | Group Presentation: New York

Dastan announces its sixth participation at Frieze New York with a presentation of works by Kamrooz Aram, Pooya Aryanpour, Maryam Hoseini and Behjat Sadr. 

Although Kamrooz Aram’s work engages with the question of ornament, he is also an artist deeply invested in the tradition of painting. Aram’s paintings, whose curved gestures, grids, and particular use of color evoke a range of art historical references from early Renaissance frescos to Persian carpets, to Minimalism, remind us that abstraction predates Modernist Painting. Abstraction, in Maryam Hoseini’s work, unfolds through the fragmentation of the human figure. In Hoseini’s paintings, bodily forms move fluidly across the composition like floral or vegetal motifs, simultaneously pierced, severed and ignited. In the case of both of these artists, the positive and negative space is conflated, creating rhythmic compositions that could be called ornamental. Suspended in the center of the booth, Pooya Aryanpour’s sculpture also references ornament in more than one way. To Aryanpour, the decorative arts of Iran “implied a deep understanding of the creative and expressive mind... that transcends mere ‘ornamentation’ or ‘decoration’. What we today perceive as ‘ornamentation’ was not intended as such at the time—the role of ornamental elements was not to attract viewers, but rather to convey and express meaning.” These ideas about ornament permeate the work of all three of these artists to various degrees. In contrast to these artists, Behjat Sadr, a pioneering figure in Iranian modern painting, strove to remain faithful to the modernist canon—going beyond what is designated as “past.” In this context, these works represent an Iranian artist of another generation, who was rooted in Iran but dedicated to the modernist painting with which she was educated in Europe.