Assar Art Gallery presents The “Still”s, the latest series of works by Elahe Heidari.
In her second exhibition with the gallery, the artist showcases eight oil paintings she has created over the past three years. Still avoiding storytelling and leaving it up to the audiences to read their stories through her pictures, Elahe breaks away from talking – the standard means of expression – and portrays the world around her with her mouthless figures.
After her 2009 Chairs series in which tables and empty chairs were pictured and her 2015 Around Objects series in which female figures discretely occupied the chairs along with the objects around them, this time the artist illustrates her concerns and feelings through her mouthless seated female figures. Unlike Around Objects, however, the women are fully painted and they have found a more realistic appeal.
Although only women are present in Elahe’s paintings, no particular gender issue is proposed. “I paint the people with whom I hang out more and even if I painted men, they, too, would be mouthless as talking is what I have problems with.” And being “mouthless” or a “woman” are not the only features of her work that do not have any contextual significance. Essentially, none of the outward characteristics of her work stands for a symbolic connotation. The loneliness of her figures, for example, comes from her own lifestyle and she doesn’t intend to put an emphasis on “solitude” as a concept. Elahe Heidari’s paintings mirror her life.
Experiencing through the process of creation, the artist portrays the change she is conceptually and technically going through. Rough textures – reckoned as Elahe’s signature – are moderated in The Stills series, and figures have become more discernable and representational. Like her themes and personal experiences, her palette, too, is a continuation of Around Objects with added purples.
Elahe Heidari was born in 1968 in Iran. She has had many solo exhibitions in Tehran since 1997 and taken part in several International group shows. She has also had residencies at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, and selected as best artist in the Fourth Isfahan Painting Biennale as well as in Dr. Soundozi’s Drawing Festival at the Imam Ali Museum in Tehran.