Haines is pleased to announce the acquisition of Shiva Ahmadi's Crown of Flames, 2026 by the Denver Art Museum, CO.
Across painting, sculpture, and video, Iranian-American artist Shiva Ahmadi fuses formal beauty with an undercurrent of violence, drawing uneasy parallels between her brightly painted scenes and global issues of war, resource extraction, and the rise of authoritarian regimes.
Crown of Flames is Ahmadi’s fourth video work, and her most complex to date. The two-channel animation comprises hundreds of individual, hand-painted watercolors that she transforms into vivid, moving images that pulse with life. The story unfolds across two parallel worlds: a lush jungle inhabited by playful monkeys on one screen, and a desert oil field and its looming, pumping machinery on the other. Drawing from diverse storytelling traditions ranging from Persian miniature painting to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Ahmadi crafts a contemporary parable about land grabs and resource wars, and the consequences for individuals and the environment.
