Born in Tehran in 1921 and died in Sagaponack, New York in 2019, Manoucher Yektai was a founding member of the New York School and major figure in abstract expressionism. His practice synthesized Iranian and American visual vocabularies, drawing on Persian rugs, calligraphic forms, domestic table settings, and mystical poetry. Yektai worked primarily in oil on canvas, developing a signature approach of richly impastoed surfaces that moved fluidly between still life, landscape, portraiture, and color field painting. His early work (1948–1949) featured organic, sinuous forms evoking calligraphic abstraction and mystical symbolism rendered in blues, creams, and browns. By the 1950s, his heavily textured surfaces became almost sculptural, transforming recognizable subjects through expressive marks and smears that blurred figuration and abstraction. From 1959 onward, Yektai created lyrical naturalistic abstractions of flora and landscape, using repeated diagonal strokes to destabilize ground and form. His work articulates a distinctly transnational vision shaped by his diasporic experience and is held in major collections including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
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