Manoucher Yektai: Beginnings

Surveying the early decades, 1948-69, of Yektai's oeuvre, during which the artist developed his abstract language through a synthesis of avant-garde movements across the Atlantic

A key figure in the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, Persian American artist Manoucher Yektai (1921-2019) produced an immense oeuvre in dialogue with both the European and American avant-gardes and the academic tradition in which he was trained in Tehran and Paris. Beginnings surveys Yektai's output between 1948 and 1969, contextualizing the artist's first decades as a painter through scholarly essays by art historians Hamed Yousefi and Tausif Noor, as well as an essay by the artist and writer Amy Sillman. Yousefi discusses Yektai's poetry and painting in the contexts of Iranian modernism and postwar American art; Noor considers the artist's idiosyncratic approach to portraiture; Sillman builds out a vision of the artist from a single slash of red in a 1957 painting. In addition to archival photographs and a plate section, an introduction by Negar Azimi and a narrative chronology further flesh out Yektai's legacy.