Narges Anvar

22 April - 13 May 2017

Fears and Inertia is a body of work by Adelaide-based, Iranian artist Narges Anvar that seeks to represent hidden feelings that manifest in a person’s appearance and body language. Anvar represents isolated individuals, those who are immersed in their own personal worlds and become passive on-lookers of their environment. The figures’ distant relationship to their surroundings and immersion in their inner feelings create an illusory world where gender and culture are irrelevant. As Anvar searches through the layers of her mind for a concrete identity, the expressive line work and brush marks evidence a lost reality, free from time and space, that contrasts the portrayals on the surface. The source of the figures in Anvar’s paintings is her ‘emotional memory’. Toni Morrison, the American novelist, describes this as what “the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared”. The high contrast between dark and light areas, divided by floating lines, represent a passage for a person to move outside emotion and to rest within their own world; to face the Fear or to live with Inertia.

The series of paintings is accompanied with sound of Anvar’s mother, Zahra Ahmadi, reading a story in Farsi. The story is about a drawn red line that breaks its boundaries to experience freedom.

Narges Anvar is an emerging artist based in Adelaide, Australia. She is a painter, working predominantly with water based materials. Her work often represents illusory and surrealistic human figures within an abstract background. Narges was born in Tehran, Iran and moved to South Australia in 2008. She graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the University of South Australia in 2016, specialising in Painting. In 2012 she was part of the group exhibition amounting to something, curated by André Lawrence.

Images by Christopher Arblaster.