Tyler Park Presents is pleased to announce Repressed Diagonal, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Amir Nikravan. The exhibition will be on view from January 4 through February 8, 2025.

Lines, marks, gestures and their interrelated groupings form the basis for written forms in which we often attribute meaning. Whether we understand them or not, we perceive them as trying to communicate something. A drawn line and the gestural attitude in which that line is drawn give way to an interpreted subjectivity of the maker; expression becomes tethered to the form which the line takes. An aggressive scribble becomes attributed to intuitive directness, a measured straight line to meditative acuity. In Repressed Diagonal, Nikravan imagines a visual language — an orthography that reflects the paradox of communication itself: the impulse to encode meaning and the inevitable gaps that arise in the process.

Repressed Diagonal continues Nikravan’s investigations into the vernacular of Middle Eastern forms that were culturally appropriated by Western design and architecture. The looping, interconnected and layered works act as a conversation between the artist and his ancestors via objects and structures. Culturally we infer and associate types of lines with regions, places, histories and peoples: the angular line with the West and the curved line with the East. Towering figures like Frank Lloyd Wright and Willem de Kooning loom large as icons of Western ingenuity, breaking from the classical and introducing the Modern. But what if the Modern was actually ancient? The scrims and facades of patterned concrete that delineate space (and the arched ramps that bridge them) are central to cultures that existed over a thousand years earlier. The gestures of Western abstractions' most-praised practitioners, their swoops of paint that frame the hand as the subliminal connector to the divine, are not so wholly original or radical in practice when we look at calligraphic practitioners from centuries past. For Nikravan, the Repressed Diagonal is a line that cuts through history — an axis that is apparent only if you want to see it.

In this exhibition, wall-mounted sculptures triangulate aspects of architecture, gesture and sign-based systems into crystallized forms. Nikravan draws from his evolving archive of glyph drawings that synthesize elements of historical Middle Eastern and South American motifs into symbolic writing systems, which become the basis for complex multi-layered works. Made through a process of building and erasure, Nikravan creates a matrix of overlapping drawings akin to layered architectural plans. These dense accumulations are then redacted until they hold a tension between what is revealed and what is obscured, revealing a unified form. The resulting plans are then carved into dense foam blocks and papier-mache coated. Each work is then finished with layers of paint that approximate the finish of a chalkboard, allowing the object to become a site of construction and erasure that points to both its making and its role as a site of continual reappraisal.

Amir Nikravan is an Iranian-Mexican-American Queer artist living in Los Angeles. He graduated with an MFA in 2011 from the University of California Irvine and a BFA in 2004 from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at venues such as Nathalie Karg (New York), Vigo (London), Various Small Fires (Los Angeles), Jonathan Viner (London), and Arndt Gallery (Berlin/Singapore). His work has also been included in group exhibitions at venues such as The Saatchi Gallery (London), The Pit (Los Angeles), Luce Gallery (Turin) and Museo Capodimente (Naples) among others. His work is in numerous private collections in these locations and notable public collections include the Marciano Art Foundation, Zabludowicz Collection, the Langson IMCA and the Palm Springs Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in publications such as Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, The Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly. Nikravan serves as the Chair of the Undergraduate Fine Art program at Art Center College of Design.