Manoucher Yektai: The Stranger and the Tree

Thickly layered paint, shifting forms and references to both Iranian and American visual traditions trace Manoucher Yektai’s evolution across the early decades of his career at ICA Miami. On view April 30 through November 22, the exhibition is the artist’s first solo museum presentation in the United States and brings together approximately 30 paintings made between 1948 and 1963.

A founding member of the New York School, Yektai moved between still life, landscape, portraiture and abstraction, often using heavily impastoed surfaces and gestural marks. The exhibition follows four bodies of work, from early paintings shaped by surrealism and calligraphic abstraction to tactile still lifes, expressive portraits and later naturalistic abstractions inspired by flowers, plants and landscape. Across these works, Yektai combined influences ranging from Persian rugs, Iranian flora and mystical poetry to Parisian modernism and Abstract Expressionism.

The exhibition takes its title from Yektai’s 2005 poem “The Stranger and the Tree,” whose image of a tree taking root in inhospitable ground echoes the artist’s diasporic experience and recurring interest in displacement, adaptation and belonging. Yektai’s work is held in collections including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.