BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
The new exhibition Terra Forma from Saman and Sasan Oskouei at IRL Gallery is a quiet storm—an atmospheric meditation on fragility, formation, and the traces of life left behind as nature and industry brush against one another. The brothers don’t shout their critique; it would be folly. Instead, they whisper it across surfaces that suggest ancient terrain, marginalized neighborhoods, and the factory floor—a cross-current of poetics and rusted precision.
Formerly known to many as the street-art duo Icy & Sot, the Oskoueis have moved far from their early stencil-protest days, carrying the soil—and perhaps a few chunks of pavement—of that journey with them. In Terra Forma, cherry-wood spheres rest in arms of bent steel, organic gestures rising from hard geometries. “These fabricated plants carry forth smooth spheres of warm cherrywood as if they were sacrificial gifts—or the building blocks of a not-too-distant future,” notes writer and historian Signe Havsteen, whose exhibition text captures the tension between the natural and the manufactured.
Mutation and evolution play out here as industrial flora absorb the ambient residue of urban life. Muted hues emerge from layered surfaces—traces of changing landscapes that resist permanence, hovering somewhere between formation and collapse. There is no romanticism; instead, the Oskoueis offer a quiet ambiguity, a recognition that the ground beneath us is ever shifting.
Steel curves because someone bent it; wood gleams because someone carved it. These are materials with histories, and under the hands of Saman and Sasan they become vessels for what remains. Terra Forma invites you to experience them as weight, as scent, as memory made solid.
