Farhad Moshiri
Flower Power
2008
Oil crystals and acrylic on canvas mounted on MDF
186 x 134 cm
Much has been said of Farhad Moshiri’s interest in merging western tropes of Pop art with his own personal language, invoking Iranian culture and tradition. Conversely, a rarely noted, indeed, a distinguishing feature of Moshiri’s practice is his desire to bring into conversation the delicate and handmade, the ornate and everyday with the aesthetics of mainstream, mass-produced culture. Unlike western Pop art, which often deploys industrial processes, Moshiri seeks to archive histories of workmanship through detailed and meticulous processes of staging. His landmark painting Flower Power (2008), which incidentally happened to be produced in the year of the global economic market crash, acutely presents this dichotomy. Here, a rendering of a future is emblematised through an oil painting of a friendly robot festooned with a necklace of crystals methodically applied, thus creating a 3D effect and a universe unto its own, demystifying the binaries of human and machine.