Statement:

Opening at Gladstone New York on June 24 new works spanning two distinct series explore the raw tension between aggression and intimacy. In this show, the artist pairs cats with cats, tigers with tigers, shapes with mirrored shapes.

Nashat’s vision is surreal, sharp, and deeply material. Digital at birth, hardened into resin, fiber, or cardboard, his works beg the question: “What does it mean, to have a body today?”

The exhibition is accompanied by a text by writer Alissa Bennett:

When I was twenty, I had a boyfriend who looked just like me. I met him in Paris, a city I’d only been in for a matter of hours when a girl I hardly knew decided to make a match of me.

“I think you’re going to fall in love with each other,” she said as she surveyed my face, tilting her head to calculate something that hovered just beyond the scope of my own vision. “You could almost be the same person.”

She made it sound easy and obvious, as though there was nothing so romantic in this world as finally discovering a way to be both almost alone and almost together at exactly the same time.///

Shahryar Nashat's practice explores the relationship between the human body and new technologies, often placing the two in conversation to highlight the vulnerability and adaptability of the human form.

With video installations, paintings and sculptures, Nashat gets at the very experience of what it means to be a body at a moment when the technologies that filter experience encourage fragmentation and distance.

Desire, mortality, fragility, and resilience are among the thematic concerns his work addresses.

He has had solo shows at numerous institutions internationally, including MASI Lugano (2024); The Art Institute of Chicago (2023);

The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago with Bruce Hainley (2023); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020); Swiss Institute, New York (2019); Kunsthalle Basel (2017); Portikus, Frankfurt (2016); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (with Adam Linder, 2016).