After receiving a western-centric art education in the UK, Iranian-British artist Samira Abbassy (b. 1965) sought inspiration from beyond the received canon. Her boldly coloured and dreamlike paintings feature references to Persian miniatures, Hindu art and Iranian Qajar painting (produced in Iran from 1781 to 1925), which she mixes with Christian and Muslim iconography and autobiographical elements reflecting her cross-cultural heritage. Abbassy’s visceral compositions, in which female bodies take centre stage, grapple with the question of how to visually portray the psychological complexity and interiority of an individual. To that end, another major influence has been the work of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, whose theory of ‘the collective unconscious’ (those aspects of unconsciousness experienced by all people in different cultures) she has taken as a premise for ‘uncovering common and divergent ideas instilled in the human psyche.’ While her figures reveal intense internal dramas, they are not portraits but archetypes that embody different psychological states.  

In each piece, Abbassy avoids conventional perspective, placing her figures in flat, ambiguous environments to convey a sense of a ‘psychic space’ as opposed to a real, three-dimensional world. At times, her figures are presented alone, as in St. Anthony Tempted By the Devil, in which the Christian saint, portrayed as a woman, is watched by ominous eyes secreted in a flowering plant; butterflies attracted to the blooms symbolise transcendence and metamorphosis – signs of hope amid psychological tumult. Elsewhere, the artist’s figures are split into a multiplicity of selves, as with Consuming Herself, where a woman engulfed in flames is joined by a column of disembodied heads. These startling faces with intense staring eyes represent inner conflict and tensions relating to the fracturing of an individual’s identity. In works such as Mirror Portal, the mirror becomes a tool for revealing psycho-emotional states and unresolved internal turmoil.