Since finishing her studies at The University of Art in Tehran, Iranian artist Pantea Rahmani (b. 1971) has exhibited extensively in her native country and participated in numerous group shows throughout Europe. For her first solo show in Dubai, B21 Gallery exhibits six black and white self-portraits. These monumental canvases, revealing acute states of being, are the very embodiment of expression in a human subject, its distillation. Meanwhile, the artist’s meticulous small paint-brush work manages to enthrall and seduce even the most highly trained eyes into imagining that the canvases have been executed in conté or pencil. It is, in fact, no exaggeration to say that this ground-breaking sequence of self-portraiture, produced in the Middle East, is a stomp through the dry land of current conventions with their tired motifs of the ‘covered woman’, repeating calligraphic gestures and neo-Oriental symbolism. In fact, in Pantea Rahmani’s colossal ‘maps of the body’ what we arrive at, finally, is an entire geography that is slowly, achingly, and brushstroke by brushstroke re-formed and reinvigorated. It is the east, if you will, rejuvenated.
(Adapted from Salar Abdoh’s catalogue text)