Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

“Manoucher Yektai: The Stranger and the Tree” is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the US. A founding member of the New York School and major figure in abstract expressionism, Yektai (b. 1921, Tehran; d. 2019, Sagaponack, NY) is known for his richly impastoed canvases, which move between still life, landscape, portrait, and color field, each moving between an expressive mark making and a commitment to the possibilities of representation. This exhibition, titled after a 2005 poem by the artist, traces four distinct series created between 1948 and 1963, and brings together some thirty paintings that reveal Yektai’s development from surrealist-inflected abstraction to his signature gestural abstraction. Yektai’s work charts a unique course in art history, drawing on Persian rugs, Iranian flora, calligraphic forms, domestic table settings, and mystical poetry. The results fuse Iranian and American visual vocabularies, Parisian modernism, and gestural painting, articulating a distinctly transnational vision within the New York School. 

The exhibition opens with rarely seen paintings from 1948 and 1949, rendered in shades of blue, cream and brown and characteristic of Yektai’s early period. These dense compositions depict flowing, organic shapes and sinuous lines that evoke calligraphic abstraction and a mystical symbolism. They establish Yektai’s early formalism while blurring distinctions of ground, depth, surface, and subject. The exhibition continues with heavily impastoed works from the 1950s, in which thick, tactile surfaces rendered paintings that are almost sculptural, transforming still lifes and table settings into three-dimensional presences. 

First developed in the early 1950s and sustained over the course of his career, the artist’s figurative works test the representational conventions of portraiture, blurring the boundary between figuration and abstraction through marks and smears that evade recognizable features and yet render his subjects layered and expressive. The exhibition closes with naturalistic abstractions from 1959 to 1963, lyrical works that depict flowers, plants, and landscape through repeated diagonal strokes. The accumulation of strokes destabilizes ground and form, as trees emerge from dense fields of gesture. This motif resonates with Yektai’s own cosmopolitan and diasporic experience. In “The Stranger and the Tree” (2005), Yektai writes that it is perhaps the solitary tree “who has not considered where to put roots / On a crackless rock out of place . . . without soil” who “will live, will thrive, will give fruit.”

Yektai’s work is held in collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Detroit Institute of Arts; Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York; the Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; the Poindexter Collection; the Montana Historical Society & Yellowstone Museum of Art; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

“Manoucher Yektai: The Stranger and the Tree” is organized by ICA Miami and curated by Donna Honarpisheh, Associate Curator.