{"id":106540,"date":"2023-05-18T17:52:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-18T15:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.apartamentomagazine.com\/?p=106540"},"modified":"2025-07-14T17:02:38","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T15:02:38","slug":"reza-shafahi-the-diary-of-a-gambler-new-york-city-exhibition-and-book-launch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.apartamentomagazine.com\/stories\/reza-shafahi-the-diary-of-a-gambler-new-york-city-exhibition-and-book-launch\/","title":{"rendered":"Reza Shafahi, the Diary of a Gambler: New York City exhibition and book launch"},"content":{"rendered":" \t\t
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\n\t\t\t\tTo access this post, you must purchase Apartamento Membership<\/a><\/span>.\t\t <\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\t\t\t\tTo access this post, you must purchase Apartamento Membership<\/a><\/span>.\t\t <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":106696,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1256],"tags":[474,477,75],"class_list":["post-106540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-event","tag-design","tag-books-writing","tag-art","text_author-apartamento","membership-content","access-restricted"],"acf":{"link_archive":false,"archive_story":null,"archive_bg":"#F5F4EE","archive_title_color":"#000000","cover_bg":"#F5F4EE","cover_title_color":"#ffffff","body_bg":"#a466e2","body_text_color":"#000000","body_captions_color":"#666666","related_bg":"#ffffff","related_text_color":"#000000","stories_bg":"#EDECEC","alternative_image":"","hover_image":"","credits":"","title_format":"center","font_size":"medium","image_format":"cover","hero_image_mobile":"","video":"","video_excerpt":"","video_format":"regular","content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"two_blocks","block_sizes":"half_40_60","content_type_left":"credits","image_size_left":"regular","image_left":104951,"video_left_url":"","video_caption_left":"","video_left_type":false,"text_left":"","credit_image":106539,"credit_link_left":{"title":"Buy the book!","url":"https:\/\/www.apartamentomagazine.com\/product\/reza-shafahi-the-diary-of-a-gambler\/","target":""},"content_type_right":"text","image_size_right":"regular","image_right":null,"video_right_url":"","video_caption_right":"","video_right_type":false,"text_right":"Reza Shafahi\u2019s story is a perfect testament to the age-old English proverb, \u2018It\u2019s never too late to try\u2019. It goes something like this:<\/strong>\r\nBorn in Saveh, Iran, in 1940, Reza\u2019s artistic career only began when he was in his 70s. He had grown up to become a successful wrestler and, once that came to its natural end, later fallen into a gambling addiction, with the same zealous obsession he\u2019d once channelled into professional sport. Reza spent decades in debt\u2014at one point, even in hiding\u2014isolated from his friends and family.<\/strong>\r\nIn 2012, Reza<\/strong>\u2019s son reached out. Mamali is an artist, and having grown up without a present father, wanted to try and connect with Reza in a new way. H<\/strong>e <\/strong>suggested they participate in a daily drawing exercise; the idea was for Reza to go first and create an initial drawing, and for Mamali to respond to it with his own sculpture, to see if there was some kind of genetic link between the two works. In short, there was. It was the first time Reza had picked up a coloured pencil in his life, and he hasn\u2019t put it down.<\/strong>\r\nWe told this near-mythical tale in issue #29 of Apartamento<\/em> magazine, when writer Jina Khayyer interviewed Reza and Mamali at their family home in Iran, photographed by a third Shafahi, respective daughter and sister, Melika. A year later, we are proud to have published Reza Shafahi, the Diary of a Gambler<\/em>, the artist\u2019s first ever book and the natural continuation of our initial meeting. To celebrate its release, an exhibition of Reza\u2019s work is on show at Club Rhubarb in New York, and opened on May 18 with a book launch and party. Check out the installation below, visit the space if you\u2019re in town, and pick up a copy of Reza\u2019s brand-new book!<\/strong>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image_size":"full","gallery":[106690]},{"acf_fc_layout":"text","text":"The works in Reza\u2019s exhibition were curated by Mamali and Tony Cox\u2014founder of Club Rhubarb at Public Access, Leo Fitzpatrick\u2019s gallery space and where Reza had his first solo show in 2019. Tony met Mamali in 2014 through their mutual friend, long-time Apartamento<\/em> contributor Michael Bullock, who insisted, \u2018You should see this guy\u2019s dad\u2019s drawings\u2019. As expected, Tony fell straight in love with Reza\u2019s work, adding him last-minute to a group exhibition he was working on at the time, Heartbeats, Hard-ons and Freakouts<\/em>. One week before it opened, a battered parcel from Iran arrived at Tony\u2019s home in upstate New York;\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThe first drawing I looked at was on the kind of paper you might have drawn on in kindergarten. It featured a woman with abs in a bikini, beating the shit out of a man with a bat, blood flying from his head. She was lying on top of him in a patch of grass. Another work depicted a woman in a mini skirt and sexy go-go boots bent over a railing, which almost looked like a guillotine. To the left of the woman, a hand coming out of the railing points to these walls, where people are creeping out from some sort of imprisonment. They look like they are feeling liberation or sexual freedom. <\/em>Thinking about it now, it feels like today\u2019s women\u2019s revolution in Iran was already happening in his drawings in 2012. <\/em>\r\n\r\nThe day I pulled those drawings from the tattered package from Iran onto my living room floor, my love relationship and addiction to Reza\u2019s work started.<\/em>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image_size":"regular","gallery":[106599]},{"acf_fc_layout":"text","text":"By that point, Reza had been drawing for almost two years. The initial task Mamali had set his father has turned into something quite different, with Reza spending days, weeks on end drawing and later painting by himself. A decade on, he has produced over 500 works, and shows no signs of slowing down. Mamali has watched his father transform in this time:\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nReza\u2019s drawings were outstanding from the get-go. He pressed his lines on paper boldly and daringly, to create forms and tell fantastic stories. I had noticed the strength of his lines in his handwriting. Starting his drawings with black pencil and marker on random pieces of paper, Reza made strides in no time at all. He spent most of his days drawing. Soon, free and daring colours accompanied his bold lines. <\/em>\r\n\r\nGamblers have a saying: If you have a strong hand but do not play it well, the cards will turn against you! Reza didn\u2019t want these cards to turn against him. He spent hours, days, weeks, and years drawing by himself. Drawing had replaced gambling. It was a new life, a new film directed by his son.<\/em>\r\n\r\n "},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image_size":"full","gallery":[106692]},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image_size":"regular","gallery":[106602,106548,106549,106550,106551,106552]},{"acf_fc_layout":"text","text":"For the first time, a selection of Reza\u2019s vibrant and sensual creations are being brought together, printed and bound in his brand-new book, Reza Shafahi, the Diary of a Gambler<\/em>. As the title suggests, Reza\u2019s own telling of events runs alongside the drawings and paintings in entry form, reimagined by Jina Khayyer from their original interview in Apartamento<\/em> magazine.\r\n\r\nThat conversation was the first time that Reza and Mamali had been interviewed together, and was a surprisingly frank yet sensitive discussion between father and son. It was guided by Jina\u2019s own perspective on the Iranian history and culture that has shaped both of the Shafahis\u2019 experiences (being of Persian descent herself) and deep curiosity for their personal journeys\u2014Mamali\u2019s early fascination with film, exploration of his sexuality, formal art studies in Paris, and relationship with his dad; Reza\u2019s life-long love for Persian literature, professional wrestling career, struggles with addiction, and relationship with his son\u2014among many other things."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image_size":"regular","gallery":[91228,91233,91126,91129,91354]},{"acf_fc_layout":"text","text":"Edited by Jina herself, Diary of a Gambler<\/em> also features a number of essays lending further context to Reza\u2019s art practice. Michael Bullock has been a fan of Reza\u2019s from the beginning, and his text shares his memories of the first time he encountered the work\u2014an afternoon in Paris that led him to buy seven drawings:\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nI don\u2019t remember much about Mamali\u2019s apartment except that every inch of floor was covered with drawings. He had spread out his father\u2019s work for my visit. The hundreds or so drawings had an undeniable collective power. His son had unlocked a private, fantastical, psycho-sexual world, which had seemingly been waiting a lifetime for the right opportunity to emerge. A man with a fully developed inner life had finally been given the keys to self-expression.<\/em>\r\n\r\nOn the floor that day were the inner workings of Reza\u2019s mind: sensuality, lust, pleasure, Persian poetry, violence, vengeance, small-village nostalgia, war, transcendence, spirituality, magic, justice, and fear. There were pop culture moments. Was that Lil\u2019 Kim? Was that Christina Aguilera? In his drawings the contemporary and the ancient merged seamlessly. It looked effortless.<\/em>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"two_blocks","block_sizes":"half_50_50","content_type_left":"image","image_size_left":"regular","image_left":106687,"video_left_url":"","video_caption_left":"","video_left_type":false,"text_left":"","credit_image":null,"credit_link_left":null,"content_type_right":"image","image_size_right":"regular","image_right":106688,"video_right_url":"","video_caption_right":"","video_right_type":false,"text_right":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image_size":"full","gallery":[106635]},{"acf_fc_layout":"text","text":"Meanwhile, a text by curator Martha Kirszenbaum steps back to look at similarities between Reza\u2019s and other artists\u2019 work, as well as delving into the images and themes which appear to run through the paintings:\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nBoth Shafahi\u2019s colourful, na\u00efve, and surrealist qualities and his floral, animal, and female motifs evoke the practice of Algerian self-taught modernist painter Baya Mahieddine. Baya\u2019s distinctive gouaches captivated the Parisian art scene from the late \u201b40s, particularly Matisse and Andr\u00e9 Breton. Fusing references drawn from her Arab and Kabyle heritage with French modernism, her flowers, animals, and especially female figures painted on cardboard reveal lush natural landscapes inhabited by richly dressed women adorned with classic Maghrebi motifs. Amid images of wild, flourishing nature, these fairytales reveal the female figure as determined and independent as the young Baya herself. In both artists\u2019 <\/em>practices, it seems like their stylistic and potentially conceptual choices also point to a liberation from the sexism inherent in the society in which Baya was raised, still evident in Iran today.<\/em>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image_size":"full","gallery":[106686]},{"acf_fc_layout":"text","text":"Interspersed throughout the book are excerpts of the Farsi poems which inspire\u2014or even explicitly feature in\u2014Reza\u2019s drawings and paintings. These are classic works by Rumi, Khayyam, Saadi, and the more modern Forough Farrokhzad, presented in both Farsi and English translation. They talk of nature\u2014brooks, cuckoos, tulips, pomegranates\u2014of palaces and kingdoms, of gods and humans, our laughter and suffering, and even the condition of addiction, to paint more detail into what is already a vivid picture of Reza\u2019s interior world.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nBlessed is the gambler who lost all<\/em>\r\n\r\nBut his desire to double down on another round<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u2014Rumi"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image_size":"regular","gallery":[106685]},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image_size":"regular","gallery":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"text","text":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image_size":"regular","gallery":""}],"related_text":"","issue":"","button_text":""},"yoast_head":"\nReza Shafahi, the Diary of a Gambler: New York City exhibition and book launch<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Reza Shafahi's inspiring journey: From wrestler and decades of gambling addiction, his artistic career began at 70, a true testament to 'never too late to try'.\" \/>\n<meta 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