Canoe No. 1

Amirhossein Bayani’s vividly coloured and highly detailed works explore themes around life, immigration, and freedom with a particular focus on the struggles of women. Working in the tradition of landscape works, his latest series The Season of Ruin’s Remembrance employs natural elements both as a way of expressing complex emotional states and envisioning a more harmonious future.

Each of the works in the series The Season of Ruin’s Remembrance was inspired by a real-life story of a woman who fought for freedom and lost her life. Rather than illustrating their heroic and tragic tales, however, Bayani envisions these figures in other-worldly forest settings: they appear memorialised as statues or else as tiny, translucent spirits, glimpsed between the trees, standing on a rock or on the edge of a lake. At first glance, these landscapes may seem to be paradisal, bursting with colour and life, but there is also an eeriness to the scenes: the shades of green are vivid to the point of being luminous, the foliage so dense it creates a kind of wall, blocking out the light. In two of the works, watery drips of red paint run down the canvas, symbolic of the bloodshed not just in the Middle East but in conflicts across the globe. ‘This tension between beauty and horror, for me, describes the struggle for emancipation,’ says Bayani. ‘It all depends on your perspective.’