Love, Lover, Repeat

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Love, Lover, Repeat

2015
Collages
Mixed media on paper
30 1/2 × 22 1/2 in. (77.47 × 57.15 cm)
Purchased with funds provided by Art of the Middle East: CONTEMPORARY (M.2017.4)
Not currently on public view

Curator Notes

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Los Angeles-based artist Farzad Kohan’s "Love, Lover, Repeat" is from the series "Love Letters," a body of work characterized by carefully crafted multilayered colorful surfaces adorned with stamped calligraphic texts or words carved into the paint. These de-contextualized texts, whether taken from the lyrics of a popular Persian song or composed by the artist himself, are a signature of Kohan’s paper works. Here, Kohan repeatedly inscribes the words eshgh, ma’shough ("love, lover" in Persian), into layers of paper: newspaper clippings, advertisements and recycled materials, signaling that the once meaningful terms of "love" and "lover" have lost their significance through the widespread proliferation of mass media imagery.
Born in Tehran in 1967, Farzad Kohan left Iran at the age of eighteen and moved to Sweden, where he lived for sixteen years. He moved to Los Angeles in 2001. Since then, Kohan has participated in many group exhibitions in the United States and as well as in Amsterdam (2015), Beirut (2015) and Dubai (2015), along with two solo exhibitions in Los Angeles (2006) and Dubai (2013).
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