This heavily illustrated book (Skira, July 2017) explores the art of Shiva Ahmadi, associate professor of art, with an essay by Talinn Grigor, professor of art history. Ahmadi's work is in collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asia Society and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

Shiva Ahmadi’s artistic practice embraces drawing and painting, particularly a rare expertise in watercolor, across 2D and 3D media and moving images. Her work explores contemporary conundrums between the historically refined aesthetics and cultural conceits of the Middle East with the violence, corruption, and uncertainties wrought not only upon local societies but the whole world by malicious, global potentates. She works with vibrant figures transposed from Iranian and Indian book-painting, as well as pleasing patterns, to create sometimes sly and often manifest themes of brutishness and mindless self-regard within abstracted land and cityscapes.

Her work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, Asia Society Museum, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, the Farjam Collection, Dubai, and the TDIC Corporate Collection, Abu Dhabi.

View the book at ArtBook