Manoucher Yektai at KARMA

James Kalm, being an art history nurd, loves to discover underexposed artists, and try to bring their work to a broader worldwide audience. Manoucher Yektai was an immigrant from Iran who arrived on the Downtown scene in the mid-1940s, and was the first Iranian painters to receive serious critical attention within the New York School. Having studied in Paris for two years before arriving in New York, Yektai never completely renounced the traditional themes of that milieu, and for the remaining sixty seven years of his painting career, he maintained a figurative element as the subject matter in his work. Using exuberantly thick oil paint, the artist painted still life and landscape motifs with his canvases on the floor, and responded in a unique way to the challenges posed by the “Action Painters”. In his painterly intensity, Yektai has been compared to contemporaries Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Karel Appel and Franz Kline. This program was recorded November 4, 2021. #jameskalmreport #jameskalmroughcut #lorenmunk