BIG BROTHER - Artworks | Amir Khojasteh | Artists

ArtChart | BIG BROTHER by Amir Khojasteh

Amir Khojasteh
BIG BROTHER 2017
Oil on canvas
Painting
19 * 23.5 cm
each panel: titled, numbered, signed and dated 2017
each: 23.5 by 19cm.; 9¼ by 7½in.

This Too Shall Pass - Sotheby's

25 June 2020

Estimation

$12,000 - $18,000

Realized Price

$20,000

33.333%

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Artwork Description

The present work by Amir Khojasteh, is perhaps his first documented series or installation of paintings. Painted in 2017, following the election of Donald Trump, this work is the most iconic series of satirical political portraiture by the artist. Opportune and pertinent to the present circumstances across the globe, the work plays into Trump’s media manic persona. Khojasteh creates a visual summary of what we could call, ‘a history of art’ – all through a single repetitive depiction of Donald Trump.

Big Brother, is a series of portraits of Donald Trump, showing the many faces of a megalomaniac through different artistic personas and different artistic movements. This work is in a sense, site specific – typically, not the case with traditional portraiture and paints Trump in the eyes and hands Mark Rothko, Willem deKooning, Diego Velázquez – or in the rendering of Cubist, Expressionist strokes. The hanging could be considered a crescendo performance, showing the ebbs and flows of an ever-evolving personality.

Layered and subtle in its readings, Khojasteh further shifts our sense of traditional portraiture, which is almost always commemorative and celebratory. This piece so evidently exists in the contrary. Timely and clever, this work is a magnificent marker of an artist’s creative and artistic talent – and an embodiment of a man that has stunned so many. Khojasteh has captured darkness and dissonance with a levity not many could achieve. Big Brother is most certainly a work that demands recognition in it’s ability to capture the Trump persona which has, like many art historical movements, managed to change the course of history.