Galerie Perrotin is proud to present the solo show by the Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri, “ PICNIC “ from 26 February to 30 March 2013. After twelve years in Los Angeles, where he completed his training at the California Institute of the Arts, Farhad Moshiri now lives and works in Tehran. Inspired by Pop Art, he has developed a remarkable and hybrid visual language that draws at once from popular Iranian and Western cultures: “The Iranians are searching for their identity. Depending on their mood, they lean towards the East or the West. Iran is undergoing an inevitable phenomenon that complicates, confounds and diversifies traditions. This is why I am just as inspired by the mall or the bazaar as I am by the ornamentation aesthetic that belongs to Iranian culture.” In the exhibition “PICNIC”, the artist continues to draw upon the traditional “feminine” technique of bead embroidery for its ornamental qualities. Here Iranian craftsmanship and pop culture merge or often confront each other with irony, “I like to uncover things that have no artistic pretention, that have been created by others and strive to recondition them in the form of works of art.” In his installations Moshiri uses the tradition of ready made by gathering found objects, an artistic practice that is entirely ignored in Iran, making use of oxymoron to reveal the ambiguity of a country that is ceaselessly transforming itself. Here, he sticks an accumulation of knives in the wall of the Gallery, to form a suggestive sentence.