Paintings · Sculpture · Works on paper
Farzad Kohan
Layered, weathered surfaces that hold stories of love, migration and identity. Born in Tehran in 1967, Kohan lives and works in Los Angeles.
Farzad Kohan (b. 1967, Tehran)
From the Figures series
In the artist’s words
“Home is something I have lost, and as a result, I had to find it again and again, only to realize that there is no single home.”
Farzad Kohan
The collection
Four bodies of work
Figures
Paintings in which figures carry the artist’s own stories and those of the people around him.
Word Paintings
Around 2011, words took the place of figures on his canvases: the same stories, now readable and at times cryptic.
Works on Paper
A large and growing body of drawings, added to daily, where a recurring figure appears among Persian letters and numbers.
Flowers
A series of paintings devoted to flowers and blossoms.
On view
Selected works
Select any work to view it larger.
Film
Farzad Kohan on Sculpture
Kohan first trained as a sculptor in Los Angeles in the late 1990s. Sculpture, installation and found objects remain part of his practice alongside painting. In this short film, he talks about sculpture.
About the artist
A practice of layers
Farzad Kohan was born in Tehran in 1967 and lives and works in Los Angeles, where he first trained as a sculptor in the late 1990s. His paintings and sculptures explore love, migration and identity, and often bring in appropriated media and found objects.
The process stays visible in the finished work. Kohan builds up his surfaces and strips them back through painting, collage, décollage and sanding, so each panel reads as both chaotic and methodical. The result suggests time passing, slow change, and stories half hidden.
Text runs throughout the work. Farsi and Arabic script add narrative. The Love Letters works on paper carry poetic confessions of longing. His more recent paintings record other people’s migration stories in typewriter lettering, like pages from an archive. Alongside this, he adds to a large body of ink drawings every day.
© Farzad Kohan. All artwork © the artist.
Los Angeles, California
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