Nazanin Pouyandeh Iran, b. 1981

Source: Templon

Born in Tehran in 1981, Nazanin Pouyandeh left Iran for France at the age of eighteen following the assassination of her father - an intellectual and translator - by Iranian secret services. In 2000, she was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, where she joined the studio of painter Pat Andrea.

The violent events that continue to shape contemporary Iran resonate persistently throughout her work, giving it a particular urgency and depth. Without ever taking the form of a manifesto, Pouyandeh’s painting captures the tensions of an era marked by crisis, bearing witness to a world that appears increasingly unstable and disquieting. Within these dense, embodied compositions, symbols and images drawn from different times and cultural spheres intersect and respond to one another, forming a kind of cultural patchwork.

Her practice develops a powerful, immersive form of figuration in which dynamics of domination and desire intertwine, while also questioning the condition of women. In canvases saturated with detail, bodies unfold through striking shifts in scale and proportion; ambiguous postures and unsettling gazes create a singular atmosphere, poised between realism and dreamlike vision. The female figure is omnipresent and sovereign, becoming at once a symbol of the human condition and the embodiment of a distinct power: that of women - their capacity for resistance, and the poetic and imaginative force that animates them.

From these striking and enigmatic compositions emerges the idea of a dreamed world, a world of emancipation and of the reinvention of relations of power. Within it appears the possibility of other equilibria, where hierarchies waver and where female bodies unfold their full power, freed from all forms of assignment.