Statement:

Karma inaugurates its new exhibition space in Chelsea at 549 West 26th Street with Landscapes, a survey of paintings by first-generation New York School painter and poet Manoucher Yektai, open from September 12 through November 9, 2024.  ///

This exhibition—the first to focus exclusively on Yektai’s landscapes—offers a selection of paintings made between 1957 and ’92. Executed to varying degrees of abstraction, these works are emblematic of a perspective on art born of his positions as at once American citizen and Iranian expat, Abstract Expressionist innovator and classicist, painter and poet, insider and outsider.

By painting both improvisationally and from memory, Yektai, as art historian and curator Suzanne Hudson argues in the show’s catalogue, was able to “produce rather than illustrate landscape.” With its modern origins in sixteenth-century Dutch painting, landscape traditionally presupposes a faithful recreation of place. Yektai’s, however, upend both genre painting and modernist abstraction.

The perspective they offer complicates inherited histories of the New York School, expanding our understanding of the Abstract Expressionist canon.