Statement:

Galerie Khoshbakht announced the first solo exhibition with Raha Raissnia. The artist will be showing new paintings and, for the first time, glass prints.

The title of the exhibition picks up on her exploration of the concept folie (French for madness).

Building on this, Raha Raissina visualizes the complex possibility space of pictorial means, as the artist manipulates photography, film and painting, exploring the boundaries of the media, breaking through them and ultimately realizing the potential of the pictorial.///

She produces her works in a multi-stage process: existing photographic or film images from her own pool are used, edited, layered, cropped, and destroyed.

Sketches serve as the basis for working through them in equal measure and generating new images from them .

Raisssina carries the layering of Expanded Cinema into her art, expanding the pictorial space layer by layer. Combined with the traditional grisaille technique, the images emerge along a narrow neutral color palette.

Accordingly, the works reflect their own mediality in form and technique: photography eludes its supposed documentary status by negating the convention of classical narratives; painting negotiates its tradition by mixing diverse techniques, not following a linear chronology of media or technique, but constantly negotiating new pictorial strategies.

Viewing her works thus demands concentration, as they elude normative narratives. Yet the precise examination of her compositions makes it possible to learn to read the complexity.

At the same time, her works are anything but random, for in her exhibitions the artist always works off concepts that on the one hand offer her a pictorial space for negotiation and on the other hand have no limits in their potential size.