Mehrnoosh Eskandari
Mehrnoosh Eskandari paints from the in-between, a space between languages, between cultures, between selves. Her work emerges not from resolution, but from rupture. It lives in the outcry of longing, in the quiet wake of exile, and in the charged stillness of a body suspended. Rooted in her lived experience as a gender-fluid Iranian immigrant woman of color, Eskandari’s practice is an ongoing act of translation:of memory into gesture, of silence into image, and of displacement into a kind of home. Her paintings do not offer answers. Instead, they illuminate complexity. For Eskandari, the practice of artmaking embraces the inherent contradictions of life as a means of asserting an unsettled existence for the immigrant, the queer body, and the woman rendered voiceless.
Her works pulse with an intuitive energy, each mark and layer carrying traces of the struggle to find ground in unfamiliar soil. Working across mediums but primarily in oil, pastel, and collage, each surface becomes a site of excavation, stratified with emotion and history. Loose brushwork and saturated tones collide with sharp insertions of paper and fragments, echoing the disjointed experience of immigration and self-invention. The materials are never incidental. Collage allows her to splice together dissonant realities, to reconstruct identity from the cut pieces of memory. Pastel softens the edges. Oil thickens the presence. Color is used liberally, almost defiantly, drawing from the aesthetics of her Los Angeles neighborhood and the hidden exuberance of underground Iranian culture. There is always a tactile urgency to the work, an unfiltered intimacy that invites viewers to touch, to feel, to remember.
In her works, the figure is never just a figure. Often a stand-in for the artist herself, the characters are self-portraits, people she has encountered, and internalized archetypes. They consider emotional intricacies that defies binary categories of male or female, local or foreign, and whole or broken. She describes an almost dual consciousness, a person within a person, reflecting the layered nature of her compositions. Often faceless, floating, or embraced,
in states of emotional exposure, they navigate the interiors of the mind, such as rooms of bold color yet marked by absence. These spaces, vibrant but hollow, are not meant to be lived in. These spaces ruminate on Eskandari’s experience of migration, not as a one-time event but as an ongoing psychological condition, sites of confrontation between the life left behind and the life being stitched together in its place.
At the heart of Eskandari’s practice is a refusal: a refusal to disappear, to comply, to shrink herself for the comfort of others. Her paintings challenge the boundaries of visibility of what stories are allowed to be told and in what language. Growing up under an authoritarian regime where women’s voices were systematically erased, Eskandari developed a need to speak through images. Her paintings combat against cultural taboos surrounding intimacy and gender by bringing the private body into public view, not as spectacle, but as truth. Here, the intimate is not hidden or ashamed; it is articulated in brushstrokes, textures, and unguarded gestures. The incorporation of collage, with its cut forms and sudden interpolations, amplifies the psychic fragmentation of exile and the ongoing attempt to piece the self back together so deeply and personally felt by Eskandari and countless others. Vulnerability, in her hands, becomes a political act. The personal becomes undeniably public.
Through her work, Eskandari’s viewers enter these liminal spaces where they must sit with discomfort. Here, they can recognize beauty in severance, to witness what it means to exist in the aftermath of uprooting. She does not offer catharsis, but she does offer company. A place to be complex. A mirror for those who feel unseen. Her work asks, what does it mean to belong when home is no longer a place but a memory? What does it mean to be whole when every part of you has lived under threat? In answering these questions through an act of presence, Mehrnoosh Eskandari creates a visual language for the unspeakable, a way of being seen, even in the most invisible spaces.