Karma 

New York NY 10009 

Manoucher Yektai 

September 30–November 13, 2021 

188 & 172 East 2nd Street 

New York, NY 10009 

…  

Who knows better than me the generosity of the morning As reflected in the eye of a fully blossomed flower … 

Let me get up 

Let me do some work 

Let me bring light 

+1 212 390 8290 www.karmakarma.org

—Manoucher Yektai, “A Worn Out Memory,” Adirondacks, October 4, 2002.  Translated from Farsi by Iraj Anvar and Darius Yektai 

Karma is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Manoucher Yektai (b. 1921,  Tehran, Iran; d. 2019, New York, NY). The exhibition will take place at Karma’s 188 and  172 East 2nd street locations, and will be Karma’s first show with Yektai. 

With decadent colors, loose brushstrokes, and heavy-handed impasto, Yektai’s paint ings fuse Eastern and Western traditions, synthesizing a unique blend of abstraction and  figuration that owed as much to Franz Kline as it did to Cezanne and the poetry of Rumi.  Influenced by his early life in Iran, his visits to Paris, and the New York School, Yektai is  recognized as one of the few Abstract Expressionists who continued working in the tra ditional still life genre. An accomplished poet, he approached the act of painting with the  melodic sensibility of his own free verse poems. The work on display at Karma charts  Yektai’s output over the course of the late 1950s to the early 2000s, spotlighting his novel  consideration of form, color, and space. 

At 188 East 2nd street, the exhibition showcases the evolution of Yektai’s still lifes from  the late 1970s to the end of the 1990s. In the 1970s, Yektai’s careful arrangements of  still lifes comprising of fruit, flowers, and plants explore the perennial subject of the line  using a palette knife; his marks are truncated, intentional, and choreographed in tight,  rigid compositions—a departure from the loose brushstrokes he used in the 1960s. The  paintings are a radical fusion of expressionism and the representational—short dashes  

of color evoke the movement of bunched fabric and buoyant flower petals; heavily layered  swaths of paint carve out fruits and cutlery set on the grid of the tablecloth. 

A few years later, Yektai’s still lifes begin to explore a dialogue between the interior and  exterior. Strong horizontal structures represent the borders of windows, introducing a  motif that would persist in his work throughout the 1980s and 90s. Yektai painted his  canvases on the floor, a mode he shared with artists such as Pollock and Frankenthaler,  allowing himself a balance of freedom and control. His paintings break up volume into a  multitude of planar surfaces, combining the aerial perspective with the traditional frontal  view of still lifes. Reminiscent of Cubism, this gesture erodes the distinction between fig ure and ground while presenting a sculptural third dimension.  

The paintings in the back room of the gallery from the early 1960s allow for closer exam ination of his fluid brushwork. Meandering brushstrokes occasionally give way to discern able subjects, exploring the legibility of form. Yektai’s canvases capture the emergence  of his visual language, one which, as Media Farzin notes, “never lost sight of the subject  as both anchor and catapult of abstraction.” Clumps of yellow dabs evoke piles of lem ons. Blue and white dashes chisel out the highlights and shadows in drapery. According  to Slifkin, these works were “a decidedly transitive operation: the painter abstracts some thing, taking a subject, whether it is a human figure, an object, or even an emotional state  or affective memory, and through an array of distilling and distorting processes renders it  indeterminate, enigmatic, and in a constant state of becoming.”  

Intimately sized canvases in 172 East 2nd Street center around smaller moments: a petite  floral arrangement; a solitary bloom; a cluster of ripening tomatoes. Their small scale  holds a narrower focus, highlighting the juxtaposition of thick plasters of paint against  thinned satin strokes of color. Ranging from the mid 1950s to the early 2000s, these works  are sites of smaller experimentation, illuminating how the smallest gesture can contain  an abundance of visual information. They highlight the poetry of Yektai’s gesture, and  how abstraction exists at the crossroads of his two practices—both in the transmutation  of feelings into the written word, and in the conversion of life into paint. 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated monograph featuring essays by  Robert Slifkin, Fereshteh Daftari, Media Farzin, and Biddle Duke, as well as a conversa tion between Hadi Fallapisheh and Tahereh Fallazadeh.

188 E 2nd Street 

Front Gallery