Before arriving in New York—where he is now installed, like an unclaimed parcel that has somehow passed through multiple customs offices—Amir Chasson (b. 1968) spent a decade in London, diligently refining his artistic faculties while absorbing, with characteristic stoicism, the city’s relentless damp. No sooner had he dried off than he relocated to Berlin, where he applied himself with equal vigour to art-making and nocturnal revelry. Now in New York, he continues to pursue his enigmatic mission, one that involves, in equal measure, delighting, perplexing, and—one assumes—sustaining himself in a city uniquely adept at ignoring artistic ambition.

Armed with an MFA from Goldsmiths, London (2010), and an MA in Design from Middlesex University (2007), Chasson moves fluently between painting, drawing, and digital media, preoccupied as he is with the grand themes of identity, transformation, and the peculiar indignities of modern existence. His efforts have been acknowledged in respectable quarters: Bloomberg New Contemporaries saw fit to include him twice (2009, 2010), and in 2012 he received the Abbey Fellowship at the British School at Rome, an honour that permitted him to contemplate the weight of history from a safe and institutionally sanctioned distance.

His work has been exhibited in various locations—some of them prestigious, others merely geographically diverse—including the Saatchi Gallery, ICA London, Leeds, Paris, Berlin, Beijing and Bratislava. More recent appearances include Heterotopia at the Biennale de l’Image Tangible in Paris (2023) and From Analog to Digital and Back Again at Hinterconti in Hamburg (2024), the titles themselves hinting at the simultaneously philosophical and deeply pragmatic task of maintaining an artistic practice in the digital age. His work resides in collections both public and private, no doubt admired in hushed tones by collectors who believe themselves to be in possession of something significant, even if they cannot quite articulate why.

Chasson’s practice unfolds at the juncture where critique meets play, where abstraction brushes up against the representational, and where clarity, as if doubting itself, retreats into obfuscation. His background in design imparts a certain formal sharpness to the work, a sense of deliberateness that is, at times, knowingly betrayed by intuition, which enters not as an error but as a kind of deeper fidelity. It was during a springtime residency in a beautiful village in Quebec, Canada—a place whose quiet seemed to listen back—that he began carving wood. This new practice, which has since persisted with a sort of stubborn serenity, might be seen as a natural extension of his visual inquiries, or perhaps as something more elusive: a slow, almost meditative resistance to the tyranny of function, a refusal to make objects that serve.

As though the visual were merely one dialect of a larger language, Chasson has also turned to poetry, publishing in Germany and Slovakia—places where, one imagines, the act of writing still retains a certain sanctity, where readers sit alone in cafés, absorbing lines that ask more than they answer, where people still believe in the tragic glamour of suffering for art. Despite being well regarded in Europe, he has yet to secure a solo exhibition in the United States, a fact that must surely be corrected soon, assuming, of course, that the right people can be made to care. In the meantime, Chasson remains undeterred, his career unfolding with the quiet inevitability of an artist who is either destined for greatness or simply too stubborn to stop.