The international approach of photographer Shirana Shahbazi stems from her multilayered background, having been born in Tehran, educated in Germany and Switzerland and holding dual-residence in New York and Zurich. Her works are widely recognized for her arrangements of exquisitely produced still-life arrangements that confound expectation, presenting images devoid of a single particularity or origin. Art critic Roberta Smith has described Shahbazi’s photographs as “nomadic and unfixed, as befits the nature of life and, especially, identity in the age of globalism.” In the current lot, [Stilleben-14-2007], viewers are met with a 21st-century photograph based on a 17th century Dutch memento mori painting, which blurs the lines that had previously segregated the two mediums as well as collapsing the four hundred years separating the two works.

Other works by Shahbazi are currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as part of the exhibition A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio.