O Gallery presents "The Missing Piece", Armin Ebrahimi’s (b. 1984 Tehran) second solo show with the gallery. Armin Ebrahimi’s works resonate within our moment of heightened emotion, isolation, and introspection in the midst of profound changes to our social, economic and political realities. He creates dreamlike scenes that snap back and forth between the symbolic and the specific. Details speak to lived experiences as well as collective histories and memories. With parallel interests in materiality and the act of making, he uses the specific physical and chromatic qualities of his chosen medium to create ambiguous pictorial spaces that frame relationships between bodies. His scenes seem to exist both outside and deeply embedded within this uncertain time, evoking cautions, questions and desires about our bodies in relation to each other./// With an interest in allegory and symbolism, he combines autobiographical narrative with imagery that evokes broader historical references to our cultural identities. Silhouetted figures, plants and animals move against optically charged passages of pattern and saturated color. Each painting renders an iconic, tactile and tender presentation of experiences that feel at once personal and historical. In his works on paper, which embody a significant part of his practice, he sets characters from his imagination against vast expanses like outer space and the ocean, or within closely cropped, abstract fields defined by his paint’s materiality and color. He creates his characters with an economy of painterly marks; they often lack facial features and are partially clothed. Nonetheless, they announce recognizable character traits in their gestures, body language and physical relationships. His groups of people exist in collective fluidity, fitting together like indeterminate puzzle pieces. Against color fields that recall the luminous surfaces of abstraction, his figures play out scenes of adventure, solitude, collectivity and intimacy.