NILOOFAR RAHNAMA

Shadows
29 April -20 May, 2022

Assar Art Gallery presents Shadows, an exhibition of recent paintings by Niloofar Rahnama. Marked by her strong focus on simplicity, attention to everyday objects, and the limitations created by the global pandemic forcing everyone to stay indoors, the paintings are delicate but strong, and show intimate indoor spaces as well as intellectual paths of Niloofar Rahnama.

Work on these paintings started nearly three years ago, when the novel coronavirus pandemic caused a drastic change in the daily lives of all of us. Spending all of her time indoors, Rahnama developed a new relationship with objects around her —a relationship built over contemplating tranquility, rooted in her curious and observant character.

Her unique view in studying every simple and mundane object that had lost its significance through repetitious everyday interactions, and her defamiliarizing rendition, gradually gave them a new identity, enabling the artist to reinvent them in her drawings. As the intensity and characteristics of everything that had physically surrounded Rahnama grew stronger and she became more used to her new relationships with them, she started painting them, composing them in her canvases, and breathing new life into each and every one of them. In other words, exploring the essence of the routine during the inevitable lockdown, Rahnama created her own narrative, the consequence of studying the radical global change, through the language of painting.

In this new series, using gray hues in addition to focusing on objects with unique colors such as plants and composing them over the grays, while playing with light and shadow and creating pleasant corners of tranquility, Niloofar Rahnama implies a contrast between form and content, resembling the same ephemerality that our present condition implies.

Niloofar Rahnama was born in Tehran in 1975. Her work has been widely exhibited in Iran, Europe, China, and Kuwait during the past two decades.