Samira Abbassy’s Paintings Shed Light on the Interior Self in ‘Embodied Mythologies’
Samira Abbassy’s paintings and drawings contain the feel of an artist who has slowly cultivated her technique and iconography over time. Her practice contains strong personal and sociopolitical elements — revealing intense internal psychological dramas while simultaneously representing her Iranian heritage and its Persian and Arab ties. The dream-like renderings of the largely female figures present in her solo presentation Embodied Mythologies at ADVOCARTSY have a kind of Jungian undertone and display a carefully cultivated stylistic approach that manages to come across as idiosyncratic without having the feel of a brand.
While Abbassy clearly employs the beautiful patterns commonly associated with Persian craftsmanship in paintings such as “Diptych of Fractured Selves Falling Away + Silencing her Polyphony,” the work also contains a feeling of vague psychological drama that speaks across cultures, a kind of subconscious mourning or anxiety at once specific but relatable (2023). In the case of the aforementioned painting, Abbassy surrounds the two main female figures of the diptych with multiple, smaller heads, representing the way fragments of our past selves fall away in time. This allegorical approach is present throughout the exhibition and especially poignant in the painting “Bound By Her Fate” and the charcoal drawing “Self Sabotage,” in which Abbassy uses the female figure’s braided her as a symbol, looping it around her head and through her mouth as if she were either muzzled by or eating it (2013, 2020).
Having moved from Iran to London with her family as a child, Abbassy was raised in England and yet felt a strong connection to her past, especially through her mother, who never quite felt at home in their new residence. In the audio accompaniment of two pieces — “In My Hands, My Undoing” and “Intangible Threads” — recently acquired by LACMA and Mohammed Afkhami Foundaation and currently on display at LACMA’s exhibition Women Defining Women In Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond, Abbassy explains that her work has always been about finding one’s way home, and how she has ultimately arrived at the conclusion that home truly is wherever you are (2013, 2011). Throughout the exhibition, the viewer is privy to the internal lives and public outcries of not only Abbassy but a virtual multitude of women from Islamic and Middle Eastern societies, a largely silenced and under-represented group that are anything but voiceless here.
Other works in Embodied Mythologies point to brighter, more externalized transitions in life. “Floral Transfusion” shows the familiar female figure, who at this point the viewer can assume to be a representation of Abbassy herself, in a beautiful garden surrounded by a flowering tree or shrub and pressing her hand into another set of mysterious hands that emerge from the garden, almost as if from a ghost of an ancestor or a former self (2023). In “Lovers,” the only obviously male figure is present along with the female. It is represented not as an oppressor, which would be understandable given the circumstances, but as a tender equal, a true lover both in content and form (2014).
It is in the totality of the ever-present female figure’s relatable experience that the feminist, humanist, and psychological ambitions of the paintings reach their fruition. Sensually painted, with a pointed and unique touch, the paintings convey the mark of an artist who has studied not only the techniques of paintings and art history but, perhaps most importantly, herself — her own experience. It is the knowledge of self Abbassy brings to her practice that gives the work its power, its ability to impart on the viewer the humanity of the figures it contains.
Samira Abbassy’s solo exhibition Embodied Mythologies is on view at ADVOCARTSY West Hollywood through June 10, 2023. 434 N. La Cienega Blvd. West Hollywood, CA 90048.
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