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Kavi Gupta | Untitled Art, Miami Beach 2025: Sands of Miami Beach | Booth A61

Past viewing_room
2 - 7 December 2025

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    Kavi Gupta amplifies voices of diverse and underrepresented artists to expand the canon of art history. Our presentation for Untitled Art, Miami Beach 2025; MENASA+: Thresholds of Representation, extends our commitment to amplifying global voices that shape the contemporary moment. It brings together artists from across the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the AAPI diaspora— artists whose lived experiences of migration, hybridity, gender, and belonging redefine what global contemporary art can be. This curatorial framework positions MENASA+ and AAPI dialogues not as categories, but as interconnected conditions of making—translation, survival, inheritance, reinvention, and resistance. It reflects a belief that identity in art is not fixed but continuously negotiated across borders, languages, and histories of gendered power.  At a time when geopolitics continues to compress complex identities into binaries of “us” and “them,” the art world has mirrored similar patterns of exclusion and invisibility. This presentation resists that logic. It centers practitioners— particularly female and femme-identifying artists from MENASA+ and AAPI regions—whose voices have emerged from unforgiving cultural and political contexts, yet continue to embody resilience, autonomy, and creative power. 

     

    The booth is conceived as a minimalist and contemplative threshold between visibility and silence. It reflects Kavi Gupta Gallery’s ongoing commitment to offering a platform for artists whose practices confront erasure, amplify unseen narratives, and celebrate the act of creation as an act of resistance. Each work operates as both testimony and proposition, inviting viewers to ask who is seen, who is heard, and on whose terms. Through material, image, and form—In the voices of women and diasporic artists from MENASA+ and AAPI communities, this presentation speaks of endurance and transformation—of making beauty and meaning amid constraint, of holding space for memory and for change. It honors the courage to create within systems that deny freedom, asserting that art from these regions is not defined by trauma, but by imagination and hope.

     

  • TOMOKAZU MATSUYAMA

  • “The convenience of our time has made how layered our culture is indefinite. When we see an image, we try...

     

    “The convenience of our time has made how layered our culture is indefinite. When we see an image, we try to find connections. I accumulate all of this visual dialect and bring it together as though it has meaning, and the viewers make up a story based on their upbringing.”

     

    –Tomokazu Matsuyama

     


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    A first-generation Japanese American who lives and works in New York City, Tomokazu Matsuyama has developed a singular aesthetic grounded in an elegant expression of what he refers to as “the struggle of reckoning the familiar local with the familiar global.” As a bi-cultural visual artist, he is keenly aware of the nomadic diaspora, a community of wandering people who seek to understand their place in a world full of contrasting visual and cultural dialects.
     
    Though he manages a dynamic, wide ranging, and truly global practice that includes painting, sculpture, and large-scale public works, Matsuyama notably remains dedicated to furthering the most personal and intimate aspects of his aesthetic evolution. Each painting that leaves his studio is the fulfillment of hundreds of hours of work, as intensive research into source imagery converges with the application of innumerable layers of custom blended paint. The astoundingly vivid surfaces of his paintings project an almost digital brilliance, yet, upon close inspection, a painterly reality becomes clear, as hand-made brush strokes intermingle with delicately drawn figures, gestural splotches and drips, and meticulously spray-gunned backgrounds.
     

     


     

  • Tomokazu Matsuyama, If I Fell From Me to You, 2021
    Artworks

    Tomokazu Matsuyama

    If I Fell From Me to You, 2021
    Acrylic and mixed media on canvas
    63 3/4 x 66 in
    161.8 x 167.6 cm

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    Matsuyama received his MFA in Communications Design from the Pratt Institute, New York. Recent exhibitions include Recent exhibitions include, Fictional Landscape, Hirosaki Muesum of Contemporary Art, Hirosaki, Japan, Shanghai Powerlong Museum, Shanghai, China, Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &..., Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, France, Morning Sun, Edward Hopper House Museum, Nyak, USA, First/Last, Azabudai Hills Gallery, Toyko, Japan, Tomokazu Matsuyama: The Best Part About Us, Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St, Chicago, IL; Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Accountable Nature, Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai, China; Tomokazu Matsuyama: No Place Like Home, Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Luxembourg; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Oh Magic Night, Hong Kong Contemporary Art (HOCA) Foundation, Repulse Bay, Hong Kong; Edo Pop: The Graphic Impact of Japanese Prints, Japan Society, New York, NY, USA; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Palimpsest, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Thousand Regards, Katzen Arts Center at American University Museum, Washington, DC, USA; and Made in 17 hours, Museum of Contemporary Art Museum, Sydney, Australia, among others.

    Public displays of Matsuyama's work include a monumental, permanent sculptural installation, activating Shinjuku Station East Square, Tokyo, Japan, one of the busiest urban train stations in the world, as well as acclaimed, large-scale public commissions in Beverly Hills, CA, and in the Bowery neighborhood of Manhattan, mobilizing Matsuyama's signature examinations of bi-cultralism and pop culture.

    Matsuyama’s works are in the permanent collections of the Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Powerlong Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA, USA; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA, USA; the Royal Family of Dubai; Dean Collection (Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys), USA; the institutional collections of Microsoft, Toyota Automobile, Bank of Sharjah, NIKE Japan, and Levi’sStrauss and Co. Japan; the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, CA, USA; Pt. Leo Estate Sculpture Park, Melbourne, Australia; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and Xiao Museum, Suzhou, China; among others.

     

     


     

  • MANISH NAI

  • 'A friend of mine once told me he could smell my art, and when he shut his eyes returning home...

    "A friend of mine once told me he could smell my art, and when he shut his eyes returning home from my exhibition, the pins and points of colour and shapes of voids pirouette and dance in front of his eyes. Perhaps that is the way of art. He visits my exhibition and my art visits him when he is alone." 

     

    – Manish Nai

     


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    Manish Nai is on the vanguard of contemporary abstraction. His studio practice is rooted strongly in materiality and process, especially as those elements relate to daily life in Mumbai, India, where Nai lives and works.
     
    Nai prioritizes materials that are both modest and quintessentially interconnected to his surroundings, such as jute, newspaper, indigo dye, second hand books and clothing, and reclaimed metal and paper. He fashions these materials into elegant geometric forms, while allowing them to retain their natural textures and colors.
     
    Many of Nai’s pieces are studies in tedious complexities, such as the long term effects of water, light, or gravity on organic materials. Nai is particularly interested in the ways materials evolve over the course of months and years. His works can be interpreted as visual expressions of the compression of time.

     

     


     

  • Manish Nai, Untitled, 2017
    Artworks

    Manish Nai

    Untitled, 2017
    Natural and dyed jute cloth, gateway tracing paper and paint on canvas
    (Installed in 3 vertical panels)
    99 1/2 x 124 1/2 in
    252.7 x 316.2 cm

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    Nai represented India in the 9th Shanghai Biennale, Mumbai City Pavilion, Shanghai, China, and is a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award winner. His work has been exhibited by some of the most influential institutions in the world, including Het Noordbrabants Museum, Netherlands; Fondation Fernet-Branca, Saint-Louis, France; Devi Art Foundation, Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum, Ahmedabad, India; Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, India; NTU Center for Contemporary Art Singapore, Gillman Barracks, Singapore; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland; The Sculpture Park at Madhavendra Palace, Nahargrah Fort, Jaipur, India; DR. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, India; Art Science Museum, Singapore; Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Kolkata, India; National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, India; and Beppu Museum, Beppu, Japan. Nai earned a Diploma in Drawing and Painting from the L.S. Raheja School of Art in Mumbai, India.

     

     


     

  • REWIND COLLECTIVE

  • 'Did you know that the twenty most expensive artworks in the world are by white men? It is time to...

    "Did you know that the twenty most expensive artworks in the world are by white men? It is time to rewind back the patriarchy, misogyny and segregation and shine a light on those who deserve to be seen and heard."

     

    - Rewind Collective

     


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    Rewind Collective is an activist art collective of photographers, fine artists and digital creatives, working to address imbalances in representation in the contemporary art field. Through the creation of new digital artworks that respond to existing works from art history, the collective uplifts women and other marginalized groups within the field.
     
    The mobilizing theory of the collective is that technology can be used effectively as a tool to bring inequities in the art field into focus for viewers, collectors, curators and institutional power brokers. For example, the group’s Remember Us series deploys images of historical artworks and artists in their studios, digitally altering and blending them together to center minority artists who have been overlooked by the traditional Western art historical canon.
     
    A statement from the anonymous collective asserts, “Our mission is to rewind back the patriarchy, misogyny, and segregation, and shine a light on those who deserve to be seen and heard.”

     

     


     

  • Rewind Collective, Imprint Series - Frida Kahlo #1, 2022
    Artworks

    Rewind Collective

    Imprint Series - Frida Kahlo #1, 2022
    Giclée print on Hahnemühle photo rag metallic paper
    11.69 x 8.27 in
    29.7 x 21 cm
    Edition of 15 plus 5 artist's proofs

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    Rewind Collective has collaborated with major institutions, most notably Christie’s—where they produced a suite of NFTs for Trailblazers: Centuries of Female Abstraction, responding directly to physical works by Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and others. Their projects have been featured internationally through exhibitions with Amar Singh's Gallery, Institut, and The NFT Gallery, as well as partnerships with LVMH and VeVe, including the Pride NFTs supporting LGBTQ+ youth organizations. Recognized for merging activism with emerging technologies, the collective’s work has been covered by leading media outlets such as Forbes, Wallpaper, and Artnet, and is widely regarded as advancing a model of digital practice in which blockchain, image-making, and collective authorship operate as tools of social justice and cultural repair.

     


     

  • SARA RAHANJAM

  • 'I believe that the dark side and the light side of every phenomenon are inseparable from each other and are...

    "I believe that the dark side and the light side of every phenomenon are inseparable from each other and are a constant challenge to each other."

     

    - Sara Rahanjam


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    Born and raised in Iran, Sara Rahanjam's practice emerges from the lived realities of women in Iran—realities circumscribed by cultural and traditional systems that have dictated the boundaries of freedom and expression. Through her work, she channels these experiences into a broader dialogue about the collective longing for transformation that defies contemporary Iranian society.

     

    In her paintings, sculptures, performances, and writings, Rahanjam reflects the tension between endurance and rebellion. Each gesture—whether a brushstroke, a repositioning of figures, a line of text, or a composed sound—embodies both a protest and an act of reclamation. Rahanjam's work bears witness to limitations imposed upon women, and to reveal the strength, beauty, and intellect that persist in defiance of those constraints.

     

    Engaging deeply with the perspectives, needs, and pains shared among her community, Rahanjam creates works that resonate with emotional intensity. Her practice operates as both mirror and megaphone.Through this interplay of personal narrative and collective consciousness, she transforms private struggle into public discourse. At once poetic and political, Rahanjam’s work balances the refinement of aesthetic inquiry with the force of advocacy. She aspires to inspire contemplation, evoke empathy, and catalyze change—transforming art into a vehicle for awakening. Through her practice, Rahanjam continues to advance a vision of cultural and social evolution rooted in the unwavering pursuit of equality.

     


     

  • Sara Rahanjam, Silent Poultry, 2021
    Artworks

    Sara Rahanjam

    Silent Poultry, 2021
    Bronze, fiberglass
    Unique (Persian miniature hand-painted)
    7 1/8 x 5 7/8 x 4 3/4 in.
    18 x 15 x 12 cm

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    Rahanjam has held several solo exhibitions in Tehran, including "At the Border of Blue and Gray Sky" at Saless Gallery (2018), "Mania" at Etemad Gallery (2015), "Blue Sky" (2013), and "Women + I" (2012), both at Seyhoun Gallery. She has also been regularly featured in group exhibitions, both in Iran and internationally-in venues such as Paris, the U.S., and China.

     

    Her work is recognized not just for its emotional and political depth, but also for its technical rigor and material innovation. With powerful formal language and thoughtful thematic content, Rahanjam's sculptures invite viewers to reflect on social norms, personal identity, and the ways in which individuals navigate-and push against-the constraints of tradition.

     


     

     
  • HAYA ZAIDI

  • 'Brown women have been painted for decades to look like these gorgeous, exotic and obedient mystics in works of art;...

    "Brown women have been painted for decades to look like these gorgeous, exotic and obedient mystics in works of art; I want to change that. I want to re-tell our stories as South Asian women and reinvent our representation."

     

    - Haya Zaidi


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    Karachi-based multidisciplinary artist Haya Zaidi works at the convergence of Indo-Persian miniature painting, mixed media, and contemporary feminist discourse. Grounding her practice in the visual and literary lineages of South Asia, Zaidi examines how the brown female body becomes a contested site of inheritance, mythology, and resistance. Through intricate symbolism and layered narrative, she reconfigures archetypal imagery to articulate a selfhood shaped by both cultural memory and the psychic interiority of womanhood. 

     

    Zaidi’s work interrogates the iconography of femininity and the systems that script its representation. Drawing from South Asian mythological frameworks and the codified language of Indo-Persian miniature traditions, she constructs new visual propositions for how the feminine may be claimed, embodied, and reimagined. Her compositions speak to questions of sovereignty and interior power, exploring how women create agency within, and in spite of, the structures that circumscribe them.

     

    Psychological inquiry forms a central thread in her practice. Engaging with Carl Jung’s theories of archetypes, the shadow, and individuation, Zaidi reflects on the transformational potential of integrating the repressed or disavowed self. This lens resonates with the contemporary female experience in Pakistan, where shifting cultural realities are expanding the terrain for women’s self-authorship and collective visibility.

     

    Bridging image and text through the cadence of Urdu and Persian poetry, Zaidi traces themes of longing, desire, suffering, and transcendence. Her work moves fluidly between the earthly and the metaphysical, illuminating how spirituality, philosophy, and lived experience shape the emotional and cultural landscape of South Asian womanhood.

     


     

  • Haya Zaidi, Union, 2025
    Artworks

    Haya Zaidi

    Union, 2025
    Textiles, acrylics, inks and tea-wash on canvas
    48 x 36 in.

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    Haya Zaidi has developed a steadily rising exhibition presence across Pakistan and internationally, with a series of formally ambitious and conceptually rigorous solo and group presentations. Her solo exhibitions at Sanat Initiative in Karachi—Becoming (2025), Angst: Portrait of an Afterthought (2023), and Family Hall (2021)—have marked key evolutions in her practice, each expanding her exploration of gendered embodiment, domestic memory, and the politics of representation. She has also staged Unpinned at The Colony in Lahore (2021), further cementing her position within Pakistan’s contemporary art discourse. Zaidi’s work has been featured in significant group shows, including Of Women by Women: South Asian Feminist Art and Artists from the Hundal Collection at the South Asia Art Institute in Chicago (2025), signaling her growing international reach. Earlier exhibitions such as Parallel Realities (2018), Flower of a Blue Flame (2018), Microcosm (2017), and Premise of Promise (2017) at leading Karachi and Lahore venues introduced her emerging voice, establishing the conceptual foundations and visual language that continue to define her practice today.

     


     

  • GORDON CHEUNG

  • 'We perceive the world through mythologies and stories - fictional realities. These stories bind us and help unite us in...

    "We perceive the world through mythologies and stories - fictional realities. These stories bind us and help unite us in order to be able to then pursue bigger projects. The biggest projects are civilizations."

     

    - Gordon Cheung


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    Gordon Cheung has developed a multidisciplinary practice working across virtual and actual realities, to reflect on the existential questions of what it means to be human in civilisations with histories written by victors. Utilizing sculpture, painting, and digital media; Cheung merges virtual and physical realities through his works, constructing atmospheric worlds that confront the existential conditions of contemporary life.

     

    Cheung's practice interrogates a culture shaped by accelerated capitalism, algorithmic governance, and histories authored by dominant powers. His hybrid visual language draws from cultural mythology, religious symbolism, geopolitical spectacle, and the poetics of diaspora, forming hallucinatory, urban-surreal terrains that echo his own in-between identity and the psychological space of global precarity.

     


     

  • Gordon Cheung, Legend of Lake (Nanjing), 2025
    Artworks

    Gordon Cheung

    Legend of Lake (Nanjing), 2025
    Financial Times newspaper, archival inkjet, acrylic, PLA filament and sand on linen
    53 x 39 1/2 x 1 in.
    (135 x 100 x 2.5 cm)

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    Cheung earned his BFA in Painting from Central Saint Martins, London, in 1998, followed by an MFA from the Royal College of Art in 2001. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including presentations at The New Art Gallery Walsall, UK (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse); Cristea Gallery, London (The Light that Burns Twice as Bright); Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, UK (Here Be Dragons); and Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens, West Palm Beach, FL (New Order Vanitas).


    Cheung’s work is held in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Whitworth, Manchester; the Royal College of Art, London; and the British Museum, among others.

     


     

  • Alemeh Bagherian

  • 'If one woman suffers in any part of the world, all women suffer, and if a powerful and successful woman...

    "If one woman suffers in any part of the world, all women suffer, and if a powerful and successful woman is rewarded somewhere on Earth, all women everywhere rejoice. These effects are paradoxical, meaning these characters are portrayed as pure, innocent, with a halo of light over their heads, and sometimes wearing green clothing symbolizing purity."

     

    - Alemeh Bagherian


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    Alemeh (Zeinab) Bagherian Jamnani's works are rooted in a background informed by traditional Persian carpet design. Bagherian’s practice incorporates myth, imagery, and cultural memory, utilizing layers of Persian motifs, drawn largely from the Shahnameh (Epic of Kings), onto paintings of sensual female figures, celebrating the enduring beauty and complexity of womanhood within Persian culture.

     

    Written between 977 and 1010 by the poet Ferdowsi (940–1020), the Shahnameh is regarded as a repository of Persian language and identity. Composed entirely of words of Persian origin and filled with chronicles of ancient Persian kings, the text emerged after the seventh-century Islamic conquest of Persia, during a period when Arab rulers attempted to suppress the Persian language in favor of Arabic.

     

    Bagherian’s work draws from these narratives. By weaving Shahnameh imagery into her paintings, she affirms and reclaims her cultural heritage. Her meticulous attention to detail brings a captivating intricacy to each piece, while her figures convey a layered mix of sensuality, introspection, pleasure, and pain.

     


     

  • Alemeh Bagherian, I Will Never Reach You, 2021
    Artworks

    Alemeh Bagherian

    I Will Never Reach You, 2021
    Oil on canvas
    47 1/2 x 39 1/2 in.
    (120.65 x 100.33 cm)

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    Her work has been the subject of numerous solo shows at Seyhoun Gallery in Tehran include Illusion(2013), War, Peace, Love / Razzm, Solh, Eshq (2016), and Peace Lady (2018). Group exhibitions have taken her work beyond Iran, for example in London with the With My Roots show at Asia House. 

     

    Bagherian’s artistic voice is rooted in a poetic duality: she renders the feminine as simultaneously celestial and earthbound, at once spiritual and corporeal. Her paintings invite reflection on identity, resilience, and the universal yearning for inner peace, framed through the rich tapestry of Persian aesthetic traditions.

     


     

  • AADITI JOSHI

  • 'I am inspired by the form and potential of the plastic bag...as an object of trash and an object of...

    "I am inspired by the form and potential of the plastic bag...as an object of trash and an object of beauty. I invite the audience to observe objects normally bypassed and overlooked with fresh eyes."

     

    - Aaditi Joshi


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    Aaditi Joshi creates colorful, minimalist forms using plastic waste as one of her primary material elements. The ecological damage created by plastic bags in India has had a profound impact on how Joshi perceives what she calls the "dysfunctional urban landscape." Nodding to a long, global history of artists deploying common bags as an everyday artistic medium, Joshi experiments with methods of transforming the bags she collects from the landscape into delicate, ephemeral-seeming image objects. While also in a small way participating in the removal of waste from the ecosystem and the re-use of a toxic pollutant, Joshi is interested in creating abstract art that inspires vierwers to reconsider their relationship to their environment, and challenges existing definitions of beauty and ugliness.

     


     

  • Aaditi Joshi, Untitled, 2019
    Artworks

    Aaditi Joshi

    Untitled, 2019
    Wood and polypropylene bags
    36 x 36 x 2 in
    91.4 x 91.4 x 5.1 cm

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    Joshi's solo exhibitions—from Zero Opacity (Jehangir Art Gallery, 2005) to Recent Works (Museum Gallery, 2007), New Works (Gallery Maskara, 2012; TARQ, 2019), and her recent project Tensile Dimensions (Nature Morte, New Delhi, 2024)—trace the deepening of her sculptural investigations into plasticity, urban entropy, and the uneasy poetics of the Anthropocene.

     

    Joshi’s work has been positioned within major international and institutional frameworks, including Megacities Asia at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2016); OIL: Beauty and Horror in the Petrol Age at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2021); and Petromelancholia at Brutus, Rotterdam (2023), each situating her contribution within global conversations around extraction, ecology, and the afterlives of industrial materials. Her presence in key South Asian platforms—India Art Fair (2019, 2020), Rhizome at CSMVS Museum (2023), and And When She Roared the Universe Quaked at Sakshi Gallery (2022)—underscores the regional importance of her practice and its sustained resonance with curators examining ecocultural identity and material agency. Earlier exhibitions such as Present-Future at NGMA Mumbai (2005), Midnights Grandchildren at Studio X (2014), and international presentations in Paris, Shanghai, and Tuscany chart the emergence of her distinctive visual vocabulary. 

     


     

  • SHAHPARI RAHMANI

  • “We see other people's lives, we analyze them so that we don't see the passage of our own lives, we...

    “We see other people's lives, we analyze them so that we don't see the passage of our own lives, we don't see that we decided to be indifferent towards ourselves and reactive towards others”

     

    - Shahpari Rhahmani 


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    Shahpari Rahmani is an Iranian painter whose work maps the psychic terrain of contemporary life through a highly textural, expressive visual language. Rooted in her formal training at Alzahra University—where she earned degrees in Graphic Design, Painting, and a Master’s in Painting—Rahmani's practice threads together material rigor with an acute sensitivity to cultural memory.

     

    Working primarily in acrylic and mixed media on canvas, Rahmani builds chromatic, atmospheric fields that oscillate between abstraction and figuration. Her surfaces carry the imprint of layered gestures, unruly marks, and spectral silhouettes, evoking states of uprising, rupture, and renewal. Across her paintings, the figure often appears dissolved or reconstituted—an emblem of both vulnerability and insistence.

     


     

  • Shahpari Rahmani, And That's How You Stay, 2023
    Artworks

    Shahpari Rahmani

    And That's How You Stay, 2023
    Acrylic on canvas
    57 1/8 x 35 3/8 in.
    (145 x 90 cm)

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    Rahmani’s work has been exhibited across Tehran, including presentations at Ginos Gallery (2015), Farhangsarai Ferdous Gallery (2016), and Milad Tower Gallery (2016). Her recent pieces, shared widely through digital platforms, extend her ongoing inquiry into the body as a site of transformation, questioning how personal and collective narratives are shaped, obscured, or reclaimed through gesture. Rahmani positions painting as an arena where memory, myth, and interior life converge. Her canvases stand as charged thresholds, inviting viewers into spaces where emotion becomes material and where visibility itself becomes an act of agency.

     


     

  • MICHAEL JOO

  • 'I was taken by the fact that there was a space that was inaccessible but real' - Michael Joo

    "I was taken by the fact that there was a space that was inaccessible but real"

     

    - Michael Joo


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    Michael Joo is a conceptual artist whose work is rooted in an examination of perception. He is more interested in the way we perceive than what it is we are looking at.

     

    Joo’s multi-disciplinary studio practice mobilizes intense scientific research, ontology, epistemology, and entropy, creating a cross-disciplinary and multidimensional dialogue that results in aesthetic phenomena that document the process of their creation. The hybrid aspect of Joo’s aesthetic language reflects his own history. Born to Korean parents in the United States, Joo was raised in a multicultural environment that was influenced by a range of interests including science, academia, and artistry.

     

    By juxtaposing humanity’s various pools of knowledge and culture, Joo addresses the fluid nature of identity, mirroring the complexity and richness of his individual identity and of the collective identity of contemporary society.

     

    By combining a range of techniques associated with sculpture, painting, photography, and printmaking, the work continually blurs the boundaries between art and science. Joo’s intention as an artist is to achieve the unachievable: to make us see an object in real life that is barely conceivable as thought alone.

     


     

  • Michael Joo, Various Low Mass Stars (NY Farm Colony 2), 2018
    Artworks

    Michael Joo

    Various Low Mass Stars (NY Farm Colony 2), 2018
    Silver nitrate and epoxy ink on canvas
    62 x 47 x 2 in
    157.5 x 119.4 x 5.1 cm
    Unframed

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    Major exhibitions of Joo's work include Perspectives: Michael Joo, Smithsonian Freer | Sackler Museum, Washington, DC, USA; 49th Venice Biennale, Korean Pavilion, Italy; Sensory Meridian, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Michael Joo, Conserving Momentum (Egg/Gyro/Laundry Room), White Cube London, UK; Michael Joo: Drift, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, USA; Michael Joo: Drift (Bronx), The Bronx Museum of Arts, New York, NY, USA; Michael Joo, Doppelganger, Cass Sculpture Foundation, Sussex, UK; and Michael Joo Retrospective, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Palm Beach, CA, USA. Joo is a Senior Critic in Sculpture at Yale University and teaches in the Columbia University MFA program. His work is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Denver Art Museum; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, among others.

     


     

     


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    This curatorial vision reflects both an institutional and personal stance. As a gallerist of South Asian heritage and American formation, Kavi Gupta approaches this project as both participant and witness in an ongoing translation between cultures and histories. The gallery’s evolution mirrors that journey—building bridges between the local and the global, between the personal and the collective, between inheritance and reinvention.

     

    Through exhibitions, publications, and international presentations, Kavi Gupta Gallery continues to expand the conversation on what defines contemporary art today. By situating women and diasporic artists from Persian-ate regions at the center, the gallery affirms that diversity is not a gesture of inclusion—it is the essence of culture itself. 

     


     

     
  • EXHIBITIONS

  • Mapping Resistance: The Legacy of Black Liberation (1925-1975) , KAVI GUPTA | WASHINGTON BLVD. FL. 1
    Exhibitions

    Mapping Resistance: The Legacy of Black Liberation (1925-1975)

    KAVI GUPTA | WASHINGTON BLVD. FL. 1 25 April - 10 October 2025
    Spanning five decades featuring works by Gerald Williams, Wadsworth Jarrell, Sherman Beck, Jeff Donaldson, Omar Lama, and photographic works from the Kavi Gupta Archive by James P. Ball, James Van...
  • Matter of Fact: Material as a Political Act , KAVI GUPTA | WASHINGTON BLVD. FL. 2
    Exhibitions

    Matter of Fact: Material as a Political Act

    KAVI GUPTA | WASHINGTON BLVD. FL. 2 25 April - 10 October 2025
    These artists explore the politics of materiality, how thread, clay, pigment, and gesture can serve as acts of reclamation, resistance, and cultural continuity.
  • FAIRS

  • Staple + Stitch Art & Print Fair
    Events

    Staple + Stitch Art & Print Fair

    14 - 16 November 2025
    Kavi Gupta | Editions is pleased to participate in the Staple + Stitch art book and print fair, presenting a curated selection of art publications and artist's multiples. Staple +...

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Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd

835 W. Washington Blvd. Fl 1-3 Chicago, IL 60607

Hours | Tue–Fri: 11 am–6 pm, Sat: 12 pm–5 pm

Kavi Gupta | Editions

835 W. Washington Blvd. Fl 2 Chicago, IL 60607

Hours | Tue–Fri: 11 am–6 pm, Sat: 12 pm–5 pm

 

 

Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St

219 N. Elizabeth St. Fl 1-2 Chicago, IL 60607 
Hours | By appointment only

Kavi Gupta | Warehouse

2108 S. California Ave. Chicago, IL 60608

Hours | By appointment only

Kavi Gupta | New Buffalo

215 E. Buffalo St. #219 New Buffalo, MI 49117

Hours | By appointment only

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2025 Kavi Gupta
Online Viewing Rooms by Artlogic

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