One of the most important figures in the international contemporary art landscape, the Iranian-born multimedia artist Shirin Neshat has been acclaimed for her work exploring themes of identity and the status of women in the Middle East. While her work carries a sustained atmosphere of profound meditativeness, her strategies of approaching art range broadly across the spectrum, from photography to paintings to performance to feature-length films—a diversity attested to by the fact that she has won both the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (in 1999) and the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival (in 2009). Just this month, she added a new prize to her mantle: the Crystal Award from the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Now the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has selected Neshat for its new One-to-One artist initiative that supports contemporary artists as they create artwork in the service of advancing human rights, cultural understanding, and international peacekeeping; Artspace, in turn, has joined the Foundation to support this important program through the sale of two exclusive limited-edition prints.
To learn more about this program, and to discover the process behind Neshat's work, Artspace chairman Christopher Vroom visited the artist's New York City studio, where she told him why her most recent series was "the most significant experience I've had in making art."
