Rasoul Ashtary

Untitled, 2024
Door, newspaper, mannequin, clothing, camcorder
Dimensions variable

, 2024
Inkjet print and Gesso on linen and canvas
78 3/4 x 68 7/8 in, 200 x 175 cm

Untitled, 2024
Oil on linen
98 3/8 x 78 3/4 in, 250 x 200 cm

, 2024
Oil on linen
78 3/4 x 68 7/8 in, 200 x 175 cm

, 2024
Couch, mannequin, electric guitar, coat rack, clothing, speakers, amps, modules, raspberry pi, and glass vessels filled with Encapso K and water
Dimensions variable

, 2024
Oil on linen
68 7/8 x 59 in, 175 x 150 cm

, 2024
Oil and Inkjet print on linen and canvas, thread
98 3/8 x 78 3/4 in, 250 x 200 cm

Jean Laplanche, among the most astute interpreters of Freud, posited that human subjectivity emerges from the infant’s desperate attempt to make sense of a world of symbols, phrases, and gestures within which it finds itself suddenly, and traumatically, inundated. To be new in the world is to be overwhelmed by both its novelty and by the task of decoding its ciphers. What Laplanche calls “enigmatic messages” are those moments of frustration which are not, and cannot be, resolved: messages incomprehensible to the infant and, more often than not, unintelligible to the transmitter themselves as a primal, instructive scene. They are an “alien inside me, and even one put inside me by an alien.”


, Rasoul Ashtary offers form to the enigmatic we each carry with us from infancy. A skeletal tree repeats, inverted, against a backdrop of shapes almost bodily in their fleshy bulbousness (are our bodies not the first and most enduring alien objects we must try and fail to decode?). A skull, that eternal signifier of death, is relegated to the realm of images through the screen of a camcorder. Alongside a tangle of near-machinic apparati—a series of forms and voids tantalizingly close to being intelligible as a system—an egg holds the promise of the symbolic and the horror of obscurity in the balance.

In Laplanche’s formulation, the alien—the unknown that remains unknown—has more to teach us about the world than any meaning we may ultimately decipher. We lodge these enigmatic moments in our unconscious, and their mystery shapes our being, our ability to inquire and deduce as well as our apprehension of that which we 

work out. Therein lies our capacity for longing, suspicion, superstition, magic.


Rasoul Ashtary (b. 1991, Tehran, Iran) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. 

 is his first major solo exhibition with LOMEX and his first exhibition in the United States. Ashtary graduated from Städelschule in Frankfurt in 2022. His paintings and sculptures experiment with differing forms of visual mediation, distortion, and altered modes of perception.