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Provenance: Kashya Hildebrand Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2005.
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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE AMERICAN COLLECTOR
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium
The irresistible allure of Farhad Moshiri's overwrought and in your face Golden Love Super Deluxe lures magpie-eyed onlookers towards an ironic statement on the anomalies that arise when two cultures collide. As one of Iran's most talented contemporary artists, Moshiri draws from both Eastern and Western artistic traditions to produce works that transcend social and ethnic divides, whilst gently parodying the conspicuous consumer culture now widespread in the region. Created in 2003 as part of a series of gilded furnishings and objects, this cabinet of curiosities pairs the opulence of faux rococo furniture with a disparate clutter of ornaments as means of both heightening and subverting the role art objects play as status symbols and his nation's deep-seated attachment to glitz. In this way, Moshiri's ostentatious and fantastical sculpture displays a readiness to satirise his own success and the art world of which he is a part, as much as he is willing to mock society at large.
Following on from a tradition of Pop Art strategies, Moshiri channels far-ranging influences in his work, from Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and more recently Jeff Koons. Much like the work of Warhol and Koons, Moshiri's Golden Love Super Deluxe extols the gratification of human aspiration and desire through the elevation of consumer goods. However, Moshiri's sculpture bears only superficial resemblances to the child-like wonderment associated with the latter artist, as his visual vocabulary brings his own cultural baggage and gleeful sense of play to the subjects Iranians rarely treat with irreverence: their history, their identity and their contemporary culture.
After 13 years working and studying in Los Angeles, Moshiri settled in Tehran in the early 1990s, drawn by the blossoming of artistic expression epitomized by the international success of Iranian cinema. Upon his return, the artist was interested in observing the new social classes that had emerged in post-revolutionary Iran and who flourished following a new climate of measured tolerance and democracy. The dynamic and seemingly contradictory forces presented by a conservative establishment and a media-savvy younger generation has provided Moshiri with the raw materials to produce art that successfully broaches cultural and aesthetic biases. The meeting of East and West, of tradition and modernity characterises Moshiri's practice and now forms the matrix of Tehran's burgeoning art scene. Yet, whilst artists working in Iran today are not entirely free to make direct political, social, or religious critiques without risking outright censorship, Moshiri has found the means to use these restrictions for his own ends. For this reason, Moshiri, like many of his peers, values allusion, ambiguity, and subtlety-an under-the-radar approach that verifies, among other things, that pop culture has long since infiltrated borders in Iran just as surely as it has everywhere else in the world.
Taking 'happiness' as a starting point for this über-kitsch installation, Moshiri expresses the increasingly materialistic and decadent life-style sought after by many in modern day Iran, whilst demonstrating that even the most garish appearance of luxury suitably signifies status, wealth and power. The menagerie of objects gathered to form Golden Love Super Deluxe can primarily be identified as cultural and commercial imports from the Western world. Cars, Telephones, Mickey Mouse figurines, Italianate statuettes and Energizer Battery bunnies all jostle for attention amongst a dense treasure trove of appropriated ready-mades, which converge to critique a reckless and avaricious desire for acquisition. The liberal coating of gold, a material enmeshed with the identity of the Moshiri's native country, instantly bestows a sense of ersatz prestige on these 'precious' objects, an effect that knowingly addresses the packaging tendencies associated with culture brokering and the beguiling, but ultimately superficial, nature of glamour.
With its oblique commentary on class, commodity and the seductive nature of material, Golden Love Super Deluxe asks profound questions about the enormous changes currently taking place in Iran - changes that range from the dramatic shifts in wealth that have accompanied the country's recent economic boom and their effect on an ancient and deeply spiritual culture to modern Iran's complex relationship with the West. With characteristic verve, Moshiri has approached these issues with an exuberant, tongue-in-cheek manner, while maintaining his intense awareness of a nation coming to grips with its identity as a new crucible of globalization.
