Born and based in Berlin, Timo Nasseri channels his mother’s German background and his father’s Iranian heritage in his latest series of sculptures and drawings. Nasseri appropriates the Muqarnas, an arrangement of small pointed niches long common to of Islamic and Persian architecture, and aligns it with German existentialist thought. Rather than place his two inherited cultures in opposition, he develops the elegant design feature through an internally produced logic. Nasseri’s wall drawing Everything Is Everything (all works 2008) repeats the basic geometry of the Muqarnas structure to create an expanded web of points and lines. The pattern remains self-contained, however, like Nasseri’s white plaster “Sphere” sculptures. Perched atop black plinths, the seven sculptures in this series are not actually spheres at all, but angular forms again based on the Muqarnas system.
Nasseri’s Epistrophy I cuts a concave geometric space, lined with polished stainless steel, into the gallery’s rear wall. The title of the work alludes to the literary term epistrophe, used to describe the repetition of words at the end of consecutive phrases. Epistrophy is also the name of the 1942 album by Thelonius Monk and Kenny Clarke. Unafraid to juxtapose the patterns of grammar and jazz, Nasseri seems to allow both as a means of conceptual orientation. A type of hybrid, Epistrophy I frustrates the traditional dome orientation of the Muqarnas while mobilizing its multifaceted reflective surfaces to fragment the viewer’s image of herself.
