Statement:

My artistic approach involves a meticulous examination of indirect impressions, drawing inspiration from visceral qualities of decay and relying on personal and collective memories. Childhood experiences exploring abandoned buildings and ruins have deeply influenced my fascination with the nuanced aspects of decomposition, which serve as a foundation for my deconstructive abstractions and interventions.
In response to contemporary challenges such as the pandemic and the devastating impact of climate change, I have expanded my approach using a post-futurist methodology. This allows me to explore how contagion, whether external or self-inflicted, can transform familiar configurations into abstracted and at times, alien depictions. This broader exploration highlights the intrinsic qualities of traumatic amalgamation and raises questions about the impact of these phenomena on our experiences, memories, and sense of history.
In my most recent investigations, I am thinking about instability as both a perceptual and historical condition. I return to Cubism because, in responding to the fin de siècle, it offers a way to break the apparent containment of the object, opening it into something shifting and never fully graspable. The work presents itself as a constrained field in which space and objecthood are negotiated. The viewer is brought to the threshold as recognition falters, and the stability of the world begins to lose its footing. Today, this insight returns with new urgency: in a culture shaped by synthetic distraction, neither the object nor the world can ever be fully captured, even by the multiplicity assembled to contain them.




Bio:
Amir Hariri was born in Tehran, Iran, and immigrated to the United States to attend college in the early 1990s. After earning a master's degree in engineering from Cornell University, he spent over a decade working on design projects from concert halls and museums to glass designs for Apple. Amir also spent 5 years studying painting and printmaking at the Art Students League, during which time he served as an assistant instructor and as a member of the board. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, with pieces included in public and private collections in the United States, Italy, Spain, Hong Kong, and Japan. In New York, he has exhibited at various venues, including Atamian Hovsepian Curatorial Practice, St. Thomas Aquinas College, Children's Museum of Manhattan, Denise Bibro Fine Art, FIT, the Painting Center, PS 122 and Wave Hill. Amir's work has been written about in publications such as Arte Fuse, Hyperallergic, Pank Magazine, the Woven Tale Press and Whitehot Magazine. Awards include the Museum of Arts and Design, NARS Foundation and Greenwich House Pottery residencies, Smack Mellon 'Hot Picks' and the NYFA Fellowship.