Iman Raad | At the Earliest Ending of Winter

January 22 – February 20, 2021

Iman Raad | At the Earliest Ending of Winter

January 22 – February 20, 2021

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present At the Earliest Ending of Winter, Iman Raad’s second solo show with the gallery, consisting of a series of large-scale canvas works and more intimate reverse glass paintings.

Raad’s new work is his most personal to date, delving into the landscape of the Self through domestic scenes interrupted by unusual proximity of birds and objects.  In tightly confined and richly-hued compositions, birds plunge into teacups or grip knife edges with their talons.  Flowers unfurl against the light.  At once intimate and intimidating, Raad’s paintings express inquietude and suggest refusal as a sociopolitical space of creation.

Raised in Iran and now living in the United States, Raad works in the liminal spaces between areas of knowledge and histories.  The reverse glass paintings revisit the traditional technique of reverse painting and collage on the backside of glass, while the grand scale canvases connect the still-life genre to popular prints and hand-painted billboards and murals.  Raad’s paintings linger at the threshold of spatial depth, between the flatness of Persian miniature paintings and the perspectival space of Western painting.

The exhibition’s title is drawn from the Wallace Stevens poem Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself, which describes an atmosphere of awakening and capturing the fleeting nature of a transitional moment.  Raad’s work references this in-between moment where time and feeling meet in an extended pause, and a possible “new knowledge of reality”.

Iman Raad (b. 1979, Mashhad, Iran) is a painter based in New York City. Raad has recently had solo exhibitions at Sargent’s Daughters (New York, NY) and Dastan Gallery (Tehran, Iran), which also featured Raad’s work in a solo booth at Frieze New York 2020. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Flag Art Foundation (New York, NY), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit, MI), the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queenslands Art Gallery (Brisbane, Australia), and the Centro Cultural La Moneda (Santiago, Chile). Raad’s works are in the permanent collections of the British Museum (London, UK), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane, Australia), the Allentown Art Museum (Allentown, PA), Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Paris, France), the Ogaki Poster Museum (Ogaki City, Japan), Museum für Gestaltung Zürich (Zurich, Switzerland) and the Iranian Museum of Graphic Design (Tehran, Iran), among others. His work will be featured in the forthcoming exhibition, Reflections: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa at the British Museum (London, UK) in 2021. Raad’s work has been reviewed by the New York Times, the Brisbane Times, the Tehran Times, Artforum, Artnet, Art Monthly, the Art Newspaper, the Guardian, and Frieze, among others. Raad received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2017. He was the 2017-18 Shandaken Projects’ Paint School fellow, and an artist in residence at the Queens Museum Studio Program from 2018 to 2020. Raad is an adjunct faculty member at The Cooper Union School of Art.