From the Catalogue essay by Amanda Jiron Murphy

Le Caftan, Le Turban continues artist Negar Ahkami’s long-standing exploration of Orientalism and the ways that artistic traditions — especially those from Iran — have been absorbed, fetishized and appropriated into the Western art canon and pop-culture at-large. In this new body of work Ahkami focuses her gaze on European actresses and models including Catherine Deneuve, Sophia Loren, Talitha Getty and Kate Moss who were all depicted wearing caftans and/or turbans in film and photographs from the 1960s until the present day.
It is within the discord that these seductive images of gorgeous white women wearing (and “owning”) clothing associated with the Middle East cause that the paintings in Le Caftan, Le Turban exist.
Ahkami makes those tensions visible through her paint application, choice of imagery, pattern, texture and color. She places her white female subjects within technicolor vortexes of pattern so overwhelming that they practically threaten to consume them, a form of sensory overload that Ahkami traces back to the visceral experience of seeing the dizzying tile-work inside an Iranian mosque.
Sitting on the wall adjacent to these white icons of fashion and film are a series of miniature self-portraits in the style of Henri Matisse. Painted on the Styrofoam trays used to sell Persian cucumbers and zucchini, the artist casts herself as Matisse’s Southern Italian muse Lorette, merging Matisse’s portraits with her own face. Ahkami adopts Matisse’s stylistic approach and palette in a kinship with both the artist himself and his muse, who he would dress in “exotic” attire to emphasize her bold, dark features. Ahkami’s self-portraits are an acknowledgment of the Orientalist gaze in the Western art that inspires her, while also exploring her own feelings of being othered as a woman and an artist.

More Images