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

Khakshoor crafts psychologically charged compositions that defy linear narratives and easy interpretations, frequently subverting gender roles and identity politics. In his early teens in Iran, he had already begun to look at men with an obsessional, yet fearful fascination––both for what they were capable of and from the perspective of being a male himself. As a child, his early fascination with cinema introduced him to the Shakespearean tragedy, captured in classic productions by Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, and Laurence Olivier, which still nurtures his pictures today.