The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired a piece of Shiva Ahmadi’s art, Pipes, and posted an article about it on the Museum’s blog (Jan. 5, 2016). Click to go to the full article. Here is an excerpt of the article by Julia Rooney in the Department of Islamic Art:

Even though most paintings become richer when viewed up close, the work of Shiva Ahmadi expands greatly with close looking, revealing itself in ways I couldn’t have anticipated, even after examining the highest-quality digital image files. I first experienced Ahmadi’s work in person at a 2014 Asia Society exhibition, Shiva Ahmadi: In Focus. I remember being transfixed by the piece on view: Lotus, an animation made from a 2013 watercolor triptych. It was incredible to see her meticulously painted figures come alive in their environment. Beyond their visual allure, Ahmadi also imbues her compositions with so much narrative content, that to see this narrative actually expand over time—animated through movement—deepened the work’s meaning immensely for me. My only wish at the time was to get even closer.