Borderline

Azad Gallery is pleased to present Border Line, Amin Tehrani’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The show will open on Friday, November 1, 2024, and remain on view through November 12, 2024.

In this exhibition, Amin explores the genre of landscape painting as both subject and source. Landscape, a relatively new genre within dominant art history, only began to emerge as a subject in its own right in the seventeenth century. Prior to that, depictions of nature were largely confined to the backgrounds of portraits or historical, mythological, or religious scenes. As Jean-Luc Nancy suggests, landscape painting has always been tied to a sense of distance and loss. He writes, “Landscape begins with a notion, however vague and confused, of distancing and of a loss of sight, for both the physical eye and the eye of the mind” (Nancy, 2005).

Like photography, landscape representation often operates from a retrospective, distanced, or even nostalgic viewpoint—displaced from the present. In Tehrani’s works, this sense of displacement amplifies the viewer’s interpretation of the objects and events depicted. However, his landscapes are not realistic or descriptive depictions of the outdoors. They are instead clouded by foggy halos of light and the visual distortion caused by speed, as if seen from a moving vehicle. Impressionistic colors and storms of brush marks dissolve any fixed geography, drawing instead on personal snapshots, collective memory, and dreamscapes. Bold and emotionally resonant, these works resemble cinematic scenes from a journey.

Executed on a smaller, more intimate scale, the paintings in this exhibition move away from the classical notion of landscape defined by the absence of the figure. Instead, they focus on the contemporary environment of the flâneur—or what has been displaced in the political economy of late capitalism and urban life. In these dreamlike scenes, stilled by an ever-present horizon line, we encounter what remains: the unreachable border line.

Amin Tehrani (b. 1999) lives and works in Tehran. He graduated from Tehran School of Fine Art. Recent exhibitions include Hero, Dastan: Outside (2024); Nigh / Agreement, Azad Gallery (2022); Parenthesis, Nian Gallery (2021); Me, Emrooz Gallery, Isfahan, and Kabood Atelier Gallery, Tabriz (2019–2020); and Persons, Hamras Gallery, Tehran (2019).