Arghavan Khosravi's 'What Remains' at Uffner & Liu: Paintings Built to Be Opened

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 13, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Arghavan Khosravi's 'What Remains' at Uffner & Liu: Paintings Built to Be Opened At a Glance Worth crossing town: Khosravi's altarpiece-form paintings at Uffner & Liu only resolve for a body in the room, because the doors, cords, and plexiglass collapse to a smear on a screen. Walk into Uffner & Liu right now and the painting s do not lie flat against the wall. They have doors. Hinged panels half-cover the image, a painted curtain hides what sits behind it, leather cords hang down across the surface, and sheets of plexiglass stand between the eye and the woman half-glimpsed underneath. This is Arghavan Khosravi’s “What Remains,” up through July 2, and it is the rare show where the most important decisions are physical, not pictorial. Khosravi built this body of work on the form of the altarpiece. The gallery puts it plainly: the works adopt “the scale and intimate viewing experience of their source – hinged panels, the suggestion of movability, the invitation to look closely.” Three large wall works, one freestanding sculpture, a suite of small pieces. Acrylic, wood, leather cord, plexiglass. An altarpiece is a painting you operate, and the hang has to allow it Here is what a review about confinement and Persian-Christian hybridity tends to skip. An altarpiece was never a flat picture. It was a cabinet that opened. It lived in a niche, lit from one hard angle by a window or a candle, and its hinged doors gave it states: closed on ordinary days, open on feast days. The body approached it, and the body worked it. Drop that form into an evenly lit white room and the doors risk reading as a clever device instead of a threshold. So the real question in this show is whether each altar-form work got its own pocket of wall and a slightly raking, directional light that restores the niche logic, or whether they hang flat in the gallery’s even wash. From the room, the large works were given air and allowed to sit as objects that open, not pictures that fill a wall. That is the correct call, and it is a hanging decision before it is a curatorial one. An altarpiece was never a flat picture. It was a cabinet that opened. Plexiglass and taut cords turn gallery light into part of the composition The plexiglass is the tell. A clear sheet in front of a painted figure is a near-mirror, so the light angle decides whether the eye looks into the compartment or catches the room bouncing back across the very face Khosravi half-hid. And the suspended cords are not only imagery. Pulled taut, they cast real shadows, and if the light rakes them those real shadows fall across the painted ones and either join the composition or muddy it. A painter clocks this at once: the work is engineered so the gallery’s lighting is a collaborator, not a neutral service. Light it wrong and the obscuring that is the whole subject collapses into glare. Light it right, as here, and it is hard to tell for a second where the painted shadow ends and t