Painted Lady
SEPTEMBER is thrilled to open Laleh Khorramian: Painted Lady, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will exclusively feature paintings and works on paper, inviting those both new to and familiar with her multi-dimensional practice to be immersed in her two-dimensional works. Painting, drawings, and mixed media collage have been Khorramian’s primary focus in the studio for the last two years. The simplicity of the exhibition hang will bring our attention to the wild complexity of her compositions, each a rich and fantastical world unto itself.
Taken as a whole, the body of work crowns a protagonist: a woman’s form centrally positioned and appearing in changing contexts. She holds, carries, balances smaller figures from a child to a fox. She wears a cloak of architecture and peers from a head of fractals. She is regal, self-possessed, framed in ornate patterning, and navigating both herself and her dependents through cryptic realms.
The suggestively narrative content of Khorramian’s compositions is further emphasized in her suites of equal-sized works that are installed side by side. Suggestive of film strips, or storyboards, they contain smaller vignettes of forms that she disperses across the “pages” leaving us to draw connections and “read” the stories with only moving parts of the whole. Khorramian’s vocabulary is mysterious, other-worldly, and also human and of this earth. Hollow faces, empty spaces, incomplete figures, and indeterminate forms are mixed in with buildings, braids, books, easels, ladders, heads and hands. In many of these compositions, it’s the background to these forms that are richly colored and suggestively spatial landscapes. The subjects are rendered as line drawings with black ink and graphite and appear to float on top of the ground, detached like unaffixed paper cut-outs. We are left with a sense of inevitability, that everything can and will shift.
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SEPTEMBER