Exhibition by Maryam Hashemi & Haleh Jamali
Monday 24th January – Saturday 5th February
10am – 5pm (excluding Sundays)
Free entry
An exhibition by two contemporary Iranian artists, Maryam Hashemi and Haleh Jamali, exploring issues around cultural identity. All paintings will be available for purchase. Further information on price will be available at the exhibition.
Maryam Hashemi is an Iranian painter based in London. She works with watercolours mixed with colour pencils and acrylics on canvas also experiments with collage. She normally works spontaneously even when there is a theme to work with the imagination always finds a way. Her paintings are rooted in her subconscious and often influenced by her Iranian background and her interest in mysteries and the unknown, usually touched up with humour. Women are the main subjects and her recent works are mainly self portraits and focusing on her personal experiences of living in England and the changes she went through in finding her true identity. Each canvas shows a stage in this journey and portraits the challenges and the state of mind in that period. www.maryamhashemi.com
Haleh Jamali is a young Iranian painter, who looks at the hidden layers beneath what is seen through medium of paintings and installations. Haleh Jamali’s interest in portraiture and narratives stems from her desire to address the socio-political issue of representation, particularly for the female gender. “For me, the diversity, versatility, and unrivalled ability of portraits to communicate, make them an enigma. Indeed, my particular concern is to reveal the paradoxes and ambiguities behind the eyes of the portrait subject who tries to communicate emotions, arrest attention, and often express feelings of both attraction and repulsion.” Encouraging an intimate relationship between the viewer and the subject, Jamali considers how an individual’s identity can be constructed in relation to Others, while simultaneously suggesting that Self and Other are inseparable.
www.haleh-jamali.co.uk
