Shahryar Nashat explores the complexities and contradictions of the human body as a site of identity, labor, and material. Hustler_13.JPEG was included in an exhibition earlier this year that drew on connections between an artist and a hustler. Images of stained fabric—an outcome of the labor of both painting and hustling—appear in a number of 2D works, like the one here. In the press release for the show, Kristian Vistrup Madsen describes a provocative, though poetic, relationship between these two roles: “The hustler is his own canvas, the painter as well as his pigments. To be an artist is to turn the collateral of survival into a living. The artist is a hustler and the hustler works alone.”
Nashat has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Swiss Institute in New York; Kunsthalle Basel; Portikus, Frankfurt; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, among others. His work is in the collections of numerous public collections, including Contemporary Art Fund of the City of Geneva; Kunsthaus Zürich; The Art Institute of Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; MoMA, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin.