ILY2 is honored to present New Haven-based artist Sara Rahmanian at NADA New York, May 2-5, 2024. This marks Rahmanian’s debut at NADA, and the artist has produced a new series of paintings specifically for the occasion.

Walking into a midnight blue mise en scene, viewers find paintings in which objects may be subjects and vice versa. Or to put it another way, the animal is frequently interpolated into the vegetable and mineral in such a way to problematize identification of forms. Objects and landscapes take on appearances of the bodily and bodies merge with objects, the natural world, and the built environment. In one painting, tufts of hair sprout from the intersections of a luminous grid, in another, a bell-shaped form is clad in thick-veined skin. In yet another, a tunnel/orifice in a landscape appears to have an uvula and may or may not be about to be penetrated by what appears to be a tongue. Among the many sources that Rahmanian draws on for her works, she cites Farsi proverbs of which she says, “The world of Farsi proverbs is a polymorphic one, where anything can happen, and everything can turn into anything.”

Atefeh Ahmadi has written, “Rahmanian seeks new points of connection, between things, ideas, senses, between herself and the world.” She notes that Rahmanian’s visual language is rooted in the literary and visual culture of Iran. Ahmadi suggests that “Rahmanian paints in the semiotics of Persian poetry,” materializing “the language’s spectral and elusive sensibility with her painterly “figures of speech.”

Her work vibrates with the light-heartedness and playful spirit found in the meditations of the Persian poet and astronomer, Khayyam, on the cyclic dance of nothingness and being, personified in her work as the shape of the circle. She also engages with more literal forms of personification, drawn from proverbs and the witty humor characteristic of the Persian satirical literary tradition. In this way, her canvases challenge and expand the possibilities of living in one’s own language as a migrant.

Rahmanian begins with moments of everyday life, teeth marks on an apple, bent through memory, and resulting in what Atefeh Ahmadi calls a “fleshy, moist optics.” For her, this “act of remembering is inseparable from the act of painting: its materiality, and its extension to the thickly material world.”

NADA New York is the expression of the New Art Dealers Alliance’s commitment to the city, both as the cultural mecca in which the association’s headquarters and exhibition space are located as well as a global epicenter of emerging and established galleries and artists. This is ILY2’s second presentation at NADA’s New York fair.

Sara Rahmanian (b. 1993, Tehran, Iran) has mounted recent solo exhibitions at 1969 Gallery, New York, NY (2022), Acro_sss Project, Milan, Italy (2021), and Delgosha Gallery, Tehran, Iran (2017). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Office Baroque, Antwerp, Belgium (2022); Harkawik Gallery, New York (2022); Stable, S-Chanf, Switzerland (2021); and Lyles & King Gallery, New York, NY (2021). She won the Clifford Ross Scholarship Award and Critical Practice Grants from Yale School of Art and has seen her work featured in The Art Gorgeous Magazine, ArtEast, and Les Nouveaux Riches Magazine. Rahmanian earned her BFA in Painting from the University of Art Tehran, Iran, in 2016 and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University, New Haven, CT, in 2021. She lives and works in New Haven, CT. In the winter of 2024, Rahmanian will present a solo exhibition at ILY2, in Portland, Oregon.