The Finishing - Mona Pourebrahim & Hamidreza Yaraghchi

23.04. - 16.07.2022

"The Finishing" is the title of a new group of works by artist Mona Pourebrahim. Under this term unite images whose mystery lies in their apparent imperfection. Mountains, which in earlier paintings stood solid and firm in the landscape, whose mystery lay precisely in their density and the concealment of the background, are now left transparent and abstracted. The ambivalence between the visible and the invisible is also expressed in the color. Darkness and light stand in strong contrast to each other. They create sublimity, romance, but also menace where the darkness holds secrets. The human being is not always clearly visible. In very few works does the figure physically appear, usually being a tiny dot in vast terrain. Often it is nature itself that tells us about man, revealing changes made to it. In contrast, Mona Pourebrahim gives large areas of her canvas to a dramatic sky. The viewer should not feel too comfortable when immersed in her painting. Her poetic landscapes hold above all a hopeful sense of what remains of us as human beings. Abstraction, which is Mona Pourebrahim's goal-oriented artistic means in "The Finishing", is also what makes Hamidreza Yaraghchi's paintings seem unfinished. Through this characteristic painting style, the artist has found a tool that allows him to break the viewer's expectations and create new experiences with art. He questions painting for means that do not aim at an idealized reality, but surprise us as viewers and shake our inner security. For even if the paintings appear unfinished, they are so only in our subjective perception. It is necessary to overcome the usual habits of seeing in order to get to the core of the image. Reality and fiction blur into a dreamlike haze. Hamidreza Yaraghchi's paintings are like half-remembered dreams. His paintings carry a fascination with the uncanny, sometimes explicit, sometimes encircling. The beauty of the color, the theatricality of the light and the mastery of the painting style are irritating. They seem to be in conflict with the cruelty inherent in what is depicted. But this is exactly what makes Yaraghchi's painting unique, stimulating and surprising.

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