Project Description

An increasingly established painter in the Iranian scene, Shohreh Mehran’s practice
subverts representation and seeing. In this School Girls series, she depicts with
photo-realistic exactitude, subjects that are deliberately and persistently avoiding to
be captured in a frame. “Mehran’s subjects are either veiling themselves behind the
ideology of representation, or veiling themselves altogether, avoiding representation,
and presenting this avoidance as a subject for representation. Mehran is a photorealist
painter only in a strict or skewed sense: her work does not simply represent a
reality, it represents a reality in the act of escaping representation.” Mani Haghighi

April 2011