Hayv Kahraman has honed a signature style by repeatedly painting the same figure: a fleshy female body with pale, almost translucent skin, whose face – framed by a mass of black hair often executed with a single, swooping calligraphic gesture – displays an expression...
A mahaffa, I learn, is a handheld fan made by weaving the fronds of palm trees, a ubiquitous household item that is emblematic of Iraq and the Gulf region. It is also one of the few belongings that Hayv Kahraman’s family took with them as they fled to Sweden from...
Hayv Kahraman Jack Shainman Gallery October 26, 2017–December 20, 2017 For more than a decade, the Baghdad-born, Los Angeles–based artist Hayv Kahraman has been making paintings in a style that is unmistakably her own, mixing elements of Persian miniature and...
I passed a group of women wearing hijab on the beach the other day, talking in Arabic and English. They had pulled their chairs into the water and were sitting with the bottom of their skirts in the sea. “It’s hard for our sex to find happiness,” I heard one remark as...
By ROBERTA SMITH MARCH 26, 2015 Reviving once great artistic styles can be a fraught pursuit, whether or not they are part of an artist’s cultural heritage. Such styles must be transformed into something personal and contemporary that ideally also survives comparison...
Hayv Kahraman was in her fourth grade history class in Baghdad when the question was asked: Is Iraq a democracy or a dictatorship? Not knowing what either word meant, she guessed “dictatorship.” This proved to be the wrong choice, no matter how right the answer was:...
