The oeuvre of Iranian-born, Swiss-based artist Shirana Shahbazi (born 1974) reflects her ongoing interest in the relationship between images and their surfaces, as well as the relationship between various artistic media and their iconic qualities. The artist’s book Monstera presents Shahbazi’s recent abstract work, which features richly hued colors, objects and geometric forms. For these photographs, Shahbazi arranged real forms and bodies in her studio as if staging a still life and then photographed them from different vantage points. The light and color effects of the images suggest the kind of decorative abstraction—so easily produced digitally—that appears in screensavers and desktop wallpapers, but these are digital effects achieved through laborious analogue means. Brilliantly colored and intriguingly suggestive of depth, the photographs oscillate between representation and abstraction. Shahbazi has exhibited at MoMA, the New Museum, the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.