The first solo painting exhibition of Mahsa Tehrani (born in 1983, Tehran, Iran) entitled "Memories of the ocean swim meets", will be held from October 30 to November 23 at Bavan Gallery. In Tehrani's works, one can see many references to social issues, the artist's lived experience, and art history. Her use of green color that surges in many paintings is significant and the artist by appropriating it creates imaginary and eluding scenes. her works are vigorous and vibrant but at the same time, they seem dim and frozen. Tehrani is a narrative artist. An emotional and social narrative that is not conventional and linear, and tends to be disjointed and fragmented. It has no specific geography and has been created and taken shape in the artist's mind, and hence it extends into the mind of the audience. Tehrani, using a new language that reflects her viewpoint, becomes a narrator of a fragmented story that can lead the audience into an endless and twisting path of storytelling. We confront a combination of figures and landscapes that stands outside of time and space but reflects the paradoxes and contradictions of today's world. Tehrani employs the images around her as raw materials and builds her works on the matter and the form of their contradictions. She is concerned with the lives of humans, animals, and even plants./// These works make use of the images that the artist encounters every day in the course of her life. Images that can be taken from social media, mass media, or the artist's friends and family. These images cover a wide range of topics, from environmental issues and the extinction of species, to the emotional problems of humans. In bigger works, there is no correlation between the depicted elements, and the disjointed layers draw a line between fantasy and reality. These contradictions, which form the basis of this collection, are unimaginable and incomprehensible but at the same time, they seem plausible and understandable. There is some kind of movement in this collection. A movement that is entangled with a stillness that can be reminiscent of the lived experience of all human beings. Human figures in Tehrani's works have monochrome colorings, engaged in unclear interactions in a vague atmosphere, which is in contrast with the plains and lively landscapes they are located in. The disorder in the compositions evokes the audience to explore and read into works more deeply.

The reason I have chosen painting as a medium for presenting my ideas is a question that I have always had in my mind, wondering if the painting has a special power to influence the audience. Could contemporary painting still be a source of pleasure after modernism whose legacy is the denial of pleasure?/// Looking for an answer, I began walking in a narrow border of balance and confusion, harmony and destruction, familiarity and alienation, pleasure and disgust; Representation of what I see, imagination, and transgression of conventional values have acted as mediators for me to find a way into the complex mind of human beings and as the means to add flows of freedom to my works. Therefore, it is especially important for me to evoke different interpretations and emotional reactions from the audience, which can be a mixture of desire and rejection. While creating these works, I have been looking back to romanticism to take advantage of its features, but consciously and avoiding retrogression. My goal is to test the boundaries that existed before to affect the inner world of the audience. Visual and painterly values are applied as tools to reach this goal.