Artists using a modernist-influenced vocabulary these days tend to pointedly downplay grandiosity. The functional look of Matt Paweski’s sculptures might have something do with this tendency (he also designs furniture). So does the works’ small scale, which gives them the feeling of models or proposals rather than final statements.

Materially speaking, Paweski’s new work seems to derive in part from the monochrome-painted metal sculptures of Anthony Caro or Phillip King. But its deepest affinity with 1960s modernism might be related to what Michael Fried, writing about Caro in 1963, called “

Mordad, the fifth month of the Iranian calendar, is the hottest time of year in the country. As it happens, both the coup d’état of 1953 and the start of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 occurred on the twenty-eighth of Mordad, or August 19, according to the Gregorian calendar. Mahmoud Bakhshi’s gallery-filling installation The Unity of Time and Place, 2017, evoked this chronological overlap and a place central to these events: Abadan, an oil-producing city in southwestern Iran.

The artist approaches his story about revolutions by way of Gavaznha (The Deer, 1974), a film directed by Masoud Kimiai.