New York, NY – Leila Heller Gallery is delighted to announce the solo installation State of Suspension by Darvish at The Armory Show, Booth 238.
“For the past 57 years I’ve been trying to adapt to life on dry land, so many hard edges.
Trampolining has always helped. I find a kind of peace at the top of a jump, when there is a momentary pause before the descent. This state of suspension is difficult for me to describe verbally, so I say it through my art.
Let me know your down, so I can show you my up.”
State of Suspension explores the space between two actions: the moment when one movement has ended but the next has not yet begun. For the exhibition, Darvish Fakhr has created more than 30 new paintings that capture this sense of pause. Objects float, hover, and drift through the compositions, seemingly freed from gravity. For Fakhr, this lightness is both physical and metaphorical, reflecting the fleeting nature of life on what he describes as a “flying rock.” The paintings extend into a performance that Fakhr will present throughout the exhibition. Combining elements of tai chi and mime, he moves through the space in an exaggerated slow-motion walk, creating the impression that he is hovering rather than walking. Accompanied by calming music and dressed in loose, airy clothing, his movements bring the sense of suspension found in the paintings into the physical space of the fair.
At other moments, Fakhr deliberately interrupts this atmosphere of calm. During the fair, he will return to certain paintings and write directly across their surfaces, an act he describes as “vandalizing” his own work. Rather than destroying or obscuring the paintings, these interventions give them another layer and, in some cases, an entirely different reading. Fakhr compares the process to a chef adding the final garnish to a dish: the painting may appear complete, but one last gesture can shift the whole. In this way, the works themselves remain suspended between finished and unfinished, always open to another action.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Darvish (b. 1969) is a half-Iranian, half-American multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, performance, and what he terms “movement art.” His work explores the intersection of cultures and identities, blending Western artistic techniques with Eastern philosophies through a process of interference that may take the form of movement, paint, or text. Drawing from his Iranian heritage, Darvish often incorporates elements such as Persian poetry into oil paintings or transforms familiar Western objects into symbolic forms, such as a skateboard reimagined as a flying carpet. These gestures collapse boundaries between tradition and contemporary life, the poetic and the everyday. He describes his performance-based works as “gentle civic disruptions,” inspired by the ritual and imagery of the whirling dervish. Through these subtle interventions in public space, Darvish cross-pollinates aspects of his Eastern roots and Western upbringing, using humor and invention to challenge cultural stereotypes and preconceptions. Recurring motifs of lightness, movement, and flight function as metaphors for freedom and transcendence. Darvish has exhibited and performed internationally and his work is part of the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. He currently lives and works in Brighton, UK.