Frequent gallery hoppers will recognize Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi’s distinctive style from across the room: In four solo shows at D.C.’s Hemphill Artworks over the past decade, as well as at other venues around town, the Washington-area artist has established herself with bold works blending abstract techniques with Persian motifs and patterns.
Now, the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington has mounted a mid-career survey of Ilchi’s work, “Here the Waving Flag. Here the Other World,” that illustrates her development as an artist, particularly through a compelling selection of earlier, more autobiographical pieces that haven’t been on view in nearly 15 years.
The 30-piece show — one of the museum’s most extensive ever covering a single artist — represents something of a homecoming for Ilchi, who was a resident at MOCA (then known as the Arlington Arts Center) from 2012 to 2018. Before her Arlington residency, the artist moved from Tehran to the D.C. area at age 18 and received art degrees from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and American University.
Featuring work from 2008 to the present, the exhibition includes some previously shown standouts, such as the wondrous “We Are Forever Folding Into the Night,” the titular piece in her 2023 show at Hemphill. Layer upon layer of poured acrylic paint in deep blues creates a captivating landscape of craggy rocks and mountainous peaks, water and turbid sky, while dark silhouettes of naked trees in the foreground and touches of decorative gold filigree at the sides and top add depth and texture.
But what’s perhaps most striking here to anyone familiar with Ilchi’s more recent oeuvre are some early-career paintings in which she incorporates more of her personal background, as well as figurative representation, which doesn’t appear at all in her later work.
In four pieces in her “Traveler” series from 2008 to 2010, both the narrative elements and the titles suggest the artist was grappling with complex feelings about having left Iran. Each features the small figure of a faceless woman with a long, Rapunzel-like trail of uncovered black hair that shoots upward — defying both gravity and the mandatory hijab rules of the Islamic republic.
The smallest of these, “Too Bad, You Let Me Go!,” feels the most intimate and quietly powerful. In it, the woman sits on the ground in a black dress, a long red cord tied to her leg extending out of the frame, while behind her, a street scene of homes and trees is overlaid with Islamic floral patterns and punctuated by the orange-red of a fiery explosion.
Several pieces from the ensuing years show Ilchi experimenting with a more Jackson Pollock-like technique of spilled and splattered paint in saturated, even neon, colors on a white Mylar background. Although these works might at first appear to be pure abstract expressionism, a closer look reveals tiny female figures, again with copiously flowing black hair, as in the somewhat chaotic “Listen to My Sound of Freedom” (2013-2014). Others include small images of weapons or planes, such as 2014’s “As I Close My Eyes,” which Ilchi has said evokes her experience as a child during the Iran-Iraq War.
That undertone of darkness reemerges in a handful of works starting in 2019, in which Ilchi embraces a furious crimson color palette in compositions inspired by the concept of the sublime in the spectacular landscapes of 19th-century British Romanticists such as John Martin and J.M.W. Turner.
The large-scale “So the Darkness Shall Be the Light” (2019), with its angry swirls of deep reds and textured lumps of paint, feels almost like staring into the mouth of hell, the only evidence of earthly existence being a stand of green shrubs and a delicate illuminated archway perched on a rocky promontory overlooking the vast expanse. The tortured swirls seem to evoke both a landscape and a state of being. Several smaller paintings are similar in colors and tone, if somewhat less impactful due to their size.
Much of the rest of the show takes a very different trajectory in mood, hue and composition. A number of pieces feature a pleasing blue-green palette and combine abstraction achieved through Ilchi’s unpredictable process of pouring paint with precisely delineated decorative touches. Although the exemplary “We Are Forever Folding Into the Night” and the similarly conceived “We Are Whirled Asunder” (2024-2025) center on landscapes, in other works, Persian-influenced motifs and architectural elements come to the fore.
The stunning “I Seek What Expands the Undulating Borders,” the most recent piece in the show, is a large panel of individual squares painted with an intricate tile pattern, on top of which are splashed mesmerizing swirls of deep blue. “At the Still Point of the Turning World” portrays a radiant night sky and dreamlike tree forms that spill outside a frame within the frame, in the convention of Persian miniatures; the flora is outlined in gold, a traditional Islamic illumination technique known as tazhib.
Ilchi has a literary sensibility that comes through in her intriguing titles, which aside from the show’s early works tend toward the poetic and metaphysical. The exhibition’s title comes from a poem by Iranian American writer Kaveh Akbar.
A 2016 floor installation, “Everything Is Far and Long Gone By,” consisting of a pile of shards of tile stenciled with watercolor, acrylic and tea, is so different from the rest of the show that it feels almost out of place. The sharp, straight lines of the broken tiles appear starkly at odds with the organic abstractions and curvilinear Persian ornamentation of Ilchi’s paintings.
The sculpture seems to suggests a rupture with Ichi’s past, or a feeling of loss. But whatever she may have left behind, this exhibition reveals it’s still all there inside, powerfully enriching the trajectory of the artist’s work.
If you go
Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi: Here the Waving Flag. Here the Other World.
Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, 3550 Wilson Blvd., Arlington. mocaarlington.org.
Dates: Through Jan. 25. Museum is closed Dec. 25 through Jan. 1.
Prices: Free.
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