Exhibition: The Seismic Sanctuary by Pantea Rahmani
Location: Salsali Private Museum (SPM), Alserkal Avenue
Facebook: SALSALI PRIVATE MUSEUM
Dates: 10 September, 2012
Salsali Private Museum is pleased to present, The Seismic Sanctuary a solo exhibition
by Iranian artist Pantea Rahmani, opening in September, 2012
Well known for her monumental and meticulously detailed self-portraits, Pantea Rahmani presents her eagerly anticipated new works in an exclusive solo show at Salsali Private Museum. The Seismic Sanctuary will exhibit work from the artist’s Exposed series alongside pieces from the artist’s new series of Tehran landscapes. Within these new works, the artist’s topographical approach to the careful detailing of her own physical body in her previous self-portrait series is applied to mapping the geographical landscape of Tehran.
Tehran, a city that Pantea Rahmani states is ‘an indivisible piece of me,’ is laid out before the viewer on five-meter long canvases; monumental, monochromatic spectacles of a sprawling urban metropolis that are detailed with painstaking precision. The meticulous attention to detail within these works is juxtaposed with seething, black smoke that curls through the streets of Tehran, suffocating and consuming the city in a monochrome inferno.
Pantea Rahmani’s preoccupation with what she terms ‘the transcendence of gray shades into light...the playful submergence of shades with one another and their constant flow towards illumination,’ manifests itself in her new works. Street lamps blink brightly across the urban landscape, illuminating shadows and providing hopeful beacons amongst a labyrinthine city engulfed and suffocated by a sly and oppressive smoke that snakes its way through the streets of Tehran, smothering it in its wake.
Born in 1971, Pantea Rahmani studied visual arts at the Art University of
Tehran. She spent many years living in Europe and has exhibited her work in Hungary, Belgium and Portugal. The works of Pantea Rahmani have notably been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Teheran, in Museu da Agua in Lisbon as well as the Palacio da Bolsa in Porto. Her work has also been part of several biennials of drawing or painting in her native land.
