Shiva Ahmadi: Crown of Flames @ Haines Gallery

Haines Gallery proudly presents Crown of Flames, their second solo exhibition with Iranian-American multimedia artist Shiva Ahmadi (b. 1975, Tehran, Iran; lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area). Crown of Flames features new and recent works that continue Ahmadi’s longterm exploration of conflict, corruption, and instability, informed by her own experiences and the current news cycle. The works on view unfold as both personal testimony and global allegory, at once dazzling and devastating. Across painting, sculpture, and video, Ahmadi fuses formal beauty with an under-current of violence, drawing uneasy parallels between her brightly painted scenes and global issues of war, resource extraction, and the rise of authoritarian regimes—in the United States, Iran, Venezuela, and beyond.

Shiva Ahmadi's works have been exhibited internationally at museums including the Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Aga Khan Musuem, Toronto, Canada; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA; Asia Society Museum, New York, NY; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY; Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, CA; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK. Ahmadi has been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and a Career Achievement Award in Art, Art History, and Design from Wayne State University, Detroit, MI. Shiva Ahmadi, a monographic publication of her work, was published in 2017 by Skira.