JPEGs do no favors for Arghavan Khosravi’s work; though they look flat and one-dimensional online, the artist’s canvases are emphatically sculptural in person, with intricate constructions, illusionistic uses of depth and surface, and judicious, almost exclamatory incorporations of found materials. Their complex relations all serve to articulate an Iranian woman’s view of her homeland’s repressive religious and cultural mores. Take Black Rain (2021), from her current exhibition “In Between Places” at Rachel Uffner in New York. Six differently shaped supports made of wood and canvas—discrete picture planes—combine to form a whole. In the foreground, an unnaturally pink-hued hand, cut out of thin wood, curls around the neck of a woman painted on a tall canvas stretched over an eight-inch-deep box. Almost all the works in the exhibition feature a woman with a pensive gaze and redacted facial features—a black rectangle covering her eyes or a chain locking her mouth—who seems to be a psychological stand-in for the artist.
