Dana Nehdaran is interested in the process of painting and how it can mirror historical flows. In the past he has addressed this directly through his choices of subject matter – historical photography that is the visual core of the series Esther’s Children. It is during the work on this set of paintings that he discovered a more subtle and material history of iron. Oxidation allowed him to create images that fade into the canvas: unstable surfaces that betray a deeply personal relationship to the images of the past. The current series take this material exploration one step further. Upon his arrival in New York, Dana was surrounded with old iron rebar, beams, storm-water covers and other ironwork that is the backbone of the city. It is the ordinary visual language, full of rust and beautiful imperfections. It is the most direct manifestation of the history of the city, the structure and the process that can be accessed by mindful observation of the everyday experience. Titled Fe26 (the chemical symbol and atomic number for iron) this new body of work is created in a dialog with his new surroundings. This time, references to photography are gone and what we are left with is documentation of the meticulously controlled process of oxidation. The basic element shows both the history of the creation of the paintings and references its larger geographical context.