Hadis Bahrami — Contemporary Painting

Some mornings I read the news and nothing in the room has changed, but I feel physically heavier. I have become interested in things that have no measurable weight but alter the body: distance, waiting, memory, fear, and the uncertainty of people we love living far away. In ordinary places, I find myself looking at things that seem too insignificant to matter—a ring of water beneath a glass, the shadow of a chair, a plant growing beside me. Sometimes these small things hold my attention when larger things become impossible to hold. The figures in my paintings often close their eyes. For me, this is not a refusal to see. Sometimes I close my own eyes because the visible world has become too full, and another kind of image begins to appear. While I have been away from home, the plants around me have continued to grow. There have been days when I felt unable to move forward and noticed that, beside me, a new leaf had opened. I began thinking about those leaves as a way of measuring time. Not hope. Not decoration. Time. I don’t know whether I want to return home, or whether I am trying to stop home from disappearing inside me. My paintings begin somewhere inside that uncertainty.

Works

Between Home and Horizon

• Untitled, 2026 — Oil on canvas, 23 × 46 in (58.4 × 116.8 cm).
• The Window Has No Outside, 2026 — Oil on canvas, 46 × 35 in (116.8 × 88.9 cm).
• What We Carry, 2026 — Oil on canvas, 35 × 46 in (88.9 × 116.8 cm).
• An Organ Without a Name, 2026 — Oil on canvas, 46 × 35 in (116.8 × 88.9 cm).
• The Ground Passes Through Her, 2026 — Oil on canvas, 35 × 46 in (88.9 × 116.8 cm).

Living Against the Void

• Web, 2024 — Mixed media (oil, resin, glue), 36 × 36 in (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Oh how fiercely has passed this simple stream of life. My thoughts are like the strands of a spider's sorrowful web — thus enveloping me, thus consuming me, thus swaying upon my fetters.
• Prism, 2026 — Mixed media, 36 × 36 in (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Two faces seen through the faceted planes of a prism — fragmented, recomposed, partially revealed. The woven texture acts as both veil and lens, refracting identity through overlapping geometries of light and shadow. To be seen is not to be known; to be obscured is not to disappear.
• Nothingness, 2025 — Mixed media (oil, resin, glue), 36 × 36 in (91.4 × 91.4 cm). "I am composed of strings: zeros and ones — a clot of nothingness, spilled into life's meaningless hands."
• Sweatshop, 2025 — Mixed media (oil, resin, glue), 36 × 36 in (91.4 × 91.4 cm). "I am an island atop the back of a wandering whale. A warmth passes through me, feverful, deathful, ah, as the years of my life, vain. Sweatshop laborers are my image."
• Black Hole, 2025 — Mixed media (oil, resin, glue), 36 × 36 in (91.4 × 91.4 cm). "How swiftly my mute years passed. For all these years, I've watched with the same intentness. Can anyone believe it? I too became a black hole at last." These surfaces hold stories of fragility, memory, and quiet strength.
• After the Silence, 2026 — Mixed media (oil, resin, glue), 36 × 36 in (91.4 × 91.4 cm).

Other works

• Rise, 2025 — Mixed media (oil, resin, glue), 21 × 17 in (53.3 × 43.2 cm). This piece is about joy that arrives unannounced. It’s the moment when color breaks through stillness — not loud, not forced, just inevitable. The texture hums softly beneath the surface, like laughter remembered after quiet days. It’s a bloom born from patience, a reminder that light always finds a way in, even through the smallest cracks of time.
• Whisper, 2025 — Mixed media (oil, resin, glue), 21 × 17 in (53.3 × 43.2 cm). This piece is about rhythm — the pulse of being alive. Color dances here, not to be perfect but to be free. The dots, the motion, the balance between chaos and calm — they’re all part of the same song. It’s life in fragments: messy, bright, spontaneous, but somehow in harmony.
• The Garden Under Fire, 2026 — Mixed media (oil, resin, glue), 21 × 17 in (53.3 × 43.2 cm). The surface is marked by dark, fragmented forms that suggest impact, instability, and the lingering presence of violence. Drawing from the visual language of Persian miniature painting, this tradition is reinterpreted through abstraction, allowing memory, conflict, and environment to merge within a single field. Amid the density of the composition, small floral elements emerge across the surface. These are not decorative; they function as quiet acts of persistence, interrupting the weight of destruction with subtle signs of life. Rather than separating devastation from beauty, the painting allows them to exist simultaneously. The garden does not disappear-it endures, even under fire.

Curriculum Vitae

Full CV — education, exhibitions, awards and publications.

Technique

Works are made with an original technique developed by the artist — each surface built by hand with a handmade tool into a woven topography.