Kimia Ferdowsi Kline & Farshad Farzankia – Soul Mate

68projects is pleased to present Soul Mate, a two-person exhibition of Kimia Ferdowsi Kline and Farshad Farzankia. Kimia Ferdowsi Kline is an Iranian artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, USA, and Farshad Farzankia is also an Iranian artist who lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Though differing in stylistic approach, both artists are concerned with questions of abstraction, figuration, and the experience of the iconographic body from intimate and graphic perspectives.

With an electric relationship between the figures in her works, Kimia Ferdowsi Kline references the Fauvists in their love of intense color and Henri Matisse in his fascination with the gestural body. A notable difference, however, is the intimate scale of Kline’s paintings. Due to the small scale of the works, the viewer is drawn close, and the moments of touch between the figures feel charged with emotional friction.

Often sculpturally built up on the surface of Kline’s paintings, the touches depicted between the figures remind us of the touches of the brush used to make the work itself, and further recall the touches between a friend, a lover, or a family member. Frequently including two figures outlined with oil stick, the paintings suggest both the difficulty and the potential of intimacy. This drawn line formally introduces drawing into painting, establishing a boundary between where “you” end and “I” begin. In this way, a hovering question emerges in Kline’s work: when do we ever feel at home with the other?

Looking to Jean-Michel Basquiat as a key influence and to the language of Neo-Expressionism in his large iconic paintings, Farshad Farzankia remixes references from the 1980s to the present to tell powerful narratives of migration and power relations. He includes icons of personal importance and builds a lexicon of meaning through symbol: cameras reference his love of film and film direction; shoes become symbols of migration; and red tulips surrounding faces reference iconic posters from Farzankia’s childhood in Tehran.

Employing a similar strategy to Kline by delineating the boundary between figure and ground with oil stick, many of Farzankia’s paintings use the structure of the grid to organize productive discrepancies. A shoe sits next to a tulip, next to a person of color, next to a colonizing figure. With titles such as Negotiation Skills, the juxtaposition of charged social symbols becomes both the intellectual and visual engagement for the viewer when encountering Farzankia’s critical works.

Moving from a career as a graphic designer into painting, Farzankia’s work across media poses questions about who is seen and why, and about which objects hold meaning across borders.

By engaging the figure in both painters’ works, 68projects is excited to participate in a broader conversation about how figurative painting holds resonance across social and personal contexts. Kimia Ferdowsi Kline and Farshad Farzankia create a dialogue about how the personal becomes political through charged emotive tensions—between two figures in an embrace and two figures across a table in discussion. In this dialectic of intimacy and negotiation, both painters remind us that in the conversation between “me” and the “other,” power is never out of the question.

Kimia Ferdowsi Kline is a New York–based painter, born in 1984 in Nashville, Tennessee. She earned her MFA in Visual Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011 and holds a BFA in Painting from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Kline was the September 2017 resident artist at 68projects, Berlin.

Farshad Farzankia (born 1980) is an Iranian artist and painter living and working in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is well known for his acrylic paintings, mixed-media sculptures, and installations. Farzankia holds a bachelor’s degree in Visual Communication and worked for 15 years as a graphic designer in the fields of poster and music design before retiring from graphic design to focus on painting full time.