Artist walk through: Morteza Khakshoor

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Morteza Khakshoor works with a range of subjects, but it’s his attention to the male—in all his foibles, struggles, and pathos—that remains a salient feature of his output. As frequent protagonists in his paintings, like all of his subjects, they result from circuitous paths through found images and memories, seen and remembered, or invented from whole cloth. His consumption of these images feed into his daily drawing practice, which in turn, metabolizes disparate information into schema for paintings at once playfully tragic and colorfully dark.

Raised in Iran where, until college, boys and girls attended separate schools, Khakshoor was immersed in testosterone-laden campuses, which he calls the ‘homo-social’—particularly in those catering to the unbehaved. As he progressed to co-ed college in male-only dormitories, Khakshoor was exposed to higher stakes in the homo-social environment, in which boundaries were pushed, rules were constantly broken, and chaos loomed through state provocations of the student body. He observed the Shakespearean tragedy in his male cohort, captured in all those productions by Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, and Laurence Olivier he had seen on television as a child. Even if he barely understood these films at the time, he had already begun to look at men with an obsessional, yet fearful fascination—for what they were capable of and for being a male himself.