Iranian painters bring ‘Flowers’ to life in Paris
Five Iranian artists to open a three-day group exhibition titled ‘Flowers’ on November 27 in Paris, bringing their individual takes on the long-standing floral motif into dialogue with European painting traditions.
Simine Paris, a small curatorial platform run by Paris-based art manager Leila Varasteh, set up the show until November 30, ILNA reported.
The exhibition anchors itself in the dense neighborhood of commercial galleries and boutique project spaces that circle the Champs-Élysées, a district that often draws collectors who track Middle Eastern art pockets emerging across Europe.
The line-up, Fereydoun Ave, Farhad Ostovani, Raana Farnoud, Mina Ghaziani and Shadi Mahsa, folds five distinct vocabularies into a single, tight space.
Each artist returns to the “apparently simple” but culturally loaded flower form, a device woven through centuries of Persian poetry and miniature painting. In Iranian verse, the flower carries beauty, transience and “a sudden spark of insight”, as one curator’s note puts it. In European still-life painting, it rings with echoes of abundance, decay and the study of light.
The pieces range from canvases and paper works to painted boards and mixed-media surfaces. Some works push saturated pigments across the picture plane; others hold back, letting muted tones hover on sparse grounds.
The artists tap into different registers, Ave’s graphic discipline, Ostovani’s textured layers, Farnoud’s looser rhythms, Ghaziani’s studied calm and Mahsa’s contemplative marks, yet the works “speak across the Mediterranean”, as the organizers describe it, leaning east for their imagery while relying on the formal clarity of Western modernism.
The curatorial text frames the flower as a shifting mask. At times it summons the imagined gardens of Persian literature; elsewhere it summons the strict compositional habits of European still-lifes. The motif slips between birth and decline, abundance and withering, without settling in one place.
Each piece stands as a self-contained vignette, but together they build what the organizers call “a collective meditation” on time, remembrance and the urge to hold on to fleeting experiences. The painters move along the thin borderline between the pleasure of looking and the quiet acknowledgement that the moment will not last, a tension that the flower, in Iranian culture, has long embodied.
By setting these works side by side for only three days, Varasteh aims to keep the exhibition nimble, almost like a pop-up conversation between Iranian visual heritage and Europe’s painterly past.