Statement:

ZAM Gallery is pleased to announce Leaning, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Vali Javadiazar and Qader Mansouri, on view from July 24 through August 21, 2026.

The exhibition brings together two painters whose practices are shaped by a close engagement with the landscapes and visual worlds that surround them. In their work, familiar forms remain recognisable while undergoing subtle shifts in scale, proportion, and pictorial logic.

Their paintings suggest a world in which the familiar is never entirely fixed, and where a slight deviation can alter the way things occupy and relate to one another.

Javadiazar’s paintings are marked by an intuitive and materially charged approach to image-making.

Landscapes, animals, architectural forms, and human figures emerge through vigorous gestures and dense layers of paint, where observation gives way to a more fluid and associative mode of seeing. ///

His paintings retain the immediacy of the encountered world while allowing its forms to shift and acquire an almost dreamlike presence.

In Mansouri’s paintings, animals and human figures appear with varying degrees of clarity, moving between recognisable presence and ambiguity.

Together with elements of the landscape, they seem to inhabit fragments of an unfolding narrative—scenes whose relationships remain open, inviting the viewer to sense a story without fully resolving it.

Saturated colour and emphatic brushwork further heighten the tension between the familiarity of the image and its transformation through paint.

Rather than presenting a shared style, Leaning brings two distinct pictorial languages into conversation.

What connects the works is a sensibility toward a world that seems subtly out of alignment with itself—where forms, relationships, and meanings remain in a state of quiet movement.