mehrnaz ghafourian

In her recent works, Mehrnaz Qhafuriyan does not distance herself from her earlier concerns: she is still drawing large-scale portraits with painstaking delicacy. In order to select her subjects, she opts for old photographs, taken out of their original contexts. Here, however, she presents them in a new arrangement with colors that are not so familiar to us, so the outcome is an altogether new image. She is very much devoted to a visual recreation of individual identities in a painterly language; perhaps she is passionately drawn to the gaze of people, whose entire existence is captured in a photograph, in a split second of a shutter’s click. Now as a painter, she is passionate for reviving these images and looks. Qhafuriyan deliberately evades the black-and-white of the photographs she has drawn her subjects from—playfully, she merely uses them for the title of the present catalogue—only to make the strange faces of her paintings look even more peculiar by her unconventional choice of colors. Using tiny symbols and effulgent, resplendent colors, Qhafuriyan’s realistic imageries (whose meticulous precision indicates her dexterity in her medium of choice) have found an ironic luster in some of the compositions. Her effort in drawing the viewers’ attention to a hidden—perhaps indescribable—layer of feminine or masculine identity of the subjects seems to be successful due partly to these subtle, delicate gestures. In retelling the stories of the people she portrays, Qhafuriyan goes even further this time: with compositions depicting group portraits in weddings, and portraits of children, she wants to make sure the viewers do not miss out on the works’ central theme. Mehrnaz Ghfourian- M.a Honar Memari art university -B.a sooreh art university - Date of birth : 1983/04/28