Open Space #18 Armineh Negahdari

A graduate of the University of Tehran and the École Supérieure d’Art de Clermont-Ferrand, she is now based in Bordeaux, where she has developed a practice centered on drawing. For this exhibition, the artist presents a new body of drawings in various formats, produced over the past few months.

For Armineh Negahdari, drawing is more than a language; it is an experience – a way of life that responds to an urgency, an immediate necessity. She works without prior planning, immersed in an intense flow in which the hand – guided by intuition and hesitation – precedes the idea. The line emerges, driven by a physical commitment, generating images that are at once powerful and fragile, in pursuit of what she describes as “a physicality as credible as a body, as powerful as a mountain.” 

Each medium – paper, cardboard, canvas – becomes the site of tension between forces of oppression and resistance. Marks, repetitions, rubbings, and erasures register the energy of the gesture as vividly as the image itself. Charged with opposing forces, lines, strokes and dots – rendered in charcoal, oil pastel, graphite, or oil paint – are caught in motion, conveying a raw emotional intensity in which desire, vulnerability, and resistance surface.

Omnipresent, the human figure appears unstable and in flux – at times dislocated, at others occupying only a small portion of the sheet, leaving much of the surface blank. Armineh Negahdari’s silhouettes bear witness rather than narrate: ambiguous and charged with tension, they resist narrative resolution, poised between light and shadow.

Wary of the certainty of words, the artist embraces a form of inexpressibility akin to poetry – not to illustrate, but to be experienced. Her images evoke emotion, conjuring visions in which shifting forms “pass from the human body to fruit, then to landscape, through animals. Everything can transform before our eyes: a head becomes a fig, a mountain turns into a breast, hands become wings that become flowers. Words alter images. If I had to choose, I would always favor the image.” While her work draws on multiple references, it remains firmly rooted in the present and in lived experience.

Claudia Buizza and Ludovic Delalande (Fondation Louis Vuitton).

Armineh Negahdari’s exhibition is presented in partnership with S.M.A.K. in Ghent, which will feature a solo exhibition by the artist in 2027.

Open Space is a program dedicated to contemporary art, offering the possibility of a solo exhibition and the production of a new work.