Makan Negahban
Vitamin D
April 18 - May 16, 2026

The paintings in Vitamin D show people doing things with their bodies: working, racing, riding, swimming, floating. Activities that require physical presence and cannot be approximated.

The title names a deficiency. Vitamin D is produced through direct exposure to sunlight; its absence registers as illness. The parallel is deliberate. Outdoor life, physical activity, people doing things together in the world: these were once simply part of the day. The digital age has made them optional. These are the activities we now have to supplement.

Most of the works are set against black. The activities are not bathed in light; they are pulled out of darkness. The runner coiled at the starting line. The polo players mid-stride. Two figures at the water, one on the dock and one in it, a line between them. The swimmers in the fitness class, surrounded by words chalked on walls: GLORY, PERFECTION, SUCCESS. The language that has grown around the simple need to move.

What they share is physical engagement with the world. Painting is also that: material, resistance, something made in real space by a body at work. The subject and the means share a grammar. The painter is interested in what that looks like, and in the peculiarity of its value, in a moment when it increasingly has to be argued for.