Study for Blue Shield

Akhavan’s work builds upon a tradition of painting that resides precariously between abstraction and representation, transgression into installation. Jasper Johns comes into mind as a godfather of this tradition. Johns’ Flag series, begun in 1954, represented a paradoxical departure within the abstraction movement where the works’ composition is a representational depiction of something abstract: in Johns’ case a set of geometric shapes representative of America. But in the same year, while Johns was concerning himself with representations of the nation-state, another symbol was created in The Hague to represent an international body. The International Committee of the Blue Shield is the cultural equivalent of the Red Cross. Like classical abstraction, its symbol sought—and still seeks—to speak a universal language.    More