Gallery Isabelle presents Improvisations, a collective exhibition featuring works by three acclaimed Iranian artists: Raana Farnoud, Fereydoun Ave, and Shaqayeq Arabi. On display until 31 December 2025, this meditative show dwells on what is provisional and in flux, such as a wavering line or a repeated form that never returns the same. Rather than simply celebrating spontaneity, the exhibition reflects on how uncertainty can be inhabited, shaped, and transformed.
Raana Farnoud’s paintings depict flowers that seem almost corporeal. A deep tension runs through them, suspended between emergence and disappearance. These are not botanical still lifes; they are painterly thresholds where something struggles into presence and is always on the verge of slipping away.
Fereydoun Ave creates works that are both restrained and charged. His gestures feel weightless yet intentional, unfolding through a balance of instinct and structure. Each small element in his work becomes a point of emotional gravity in the composition. With humility and clarity, his paintings honour simplicity and allow fleeting moments to settle into quiet poetry.
Meanwhile, Shaqayeq Arabi produces delicate assemblages from desert remnants and salvaged urban materials. From the remains of a tangled ecosystem, new forms take shape. Her sculptures evoke birdlike, vegetal, or skeletal figures, transforming debris into fragile expressions of renewal.
About the artists
Raana Farnoud (b. 1953, Mashhad, Iran) studied English at Tehran’s Advanced School of Translation (BA, 1975) and painting at the Girls’ School of Fine Arts (Diploma, 1971). Her practice shifts between abstraction and figuration, yet her figurative paintings remain singular within her oeuvre and the wider context of contemporary Iranian art. Rejecting conventional representation, Farnoud does not paint portraits but presences: figures suspended in a space where inner emotional life outweighs outward form. In her work, repetition becomes a form of searching, inviting the viewer into an intimate tempo that honours vulnerability and resists closure.
Fereydoun Ave (b. 1945, Tehran, Iran) is an artist, curator, designer, and collector whose influence has been pivotal in shaping Iran’s cultural landscape. He obtained a BA in Applied Arts for Theatre from Arizona State University (USA, 1964), undertook additional studies at the University of Seven Seas (Orange, California, USA), and later graduated from New York University’s Film School in 1969.
Returning to Iran in 1970, he organised exhibitions at the Iran–America Society’s Tehran Cultural Centre and the Zand Gallery while working as a stage designer at the Theatre Workshop (Kargah-e Namayesh). After the 1979 Revolution, he remained in Iran and founded 13 Vanak Street, an independent space for artistic experimentation.
Ave’s mixed-media practice reflects on age, myth, heredity, the seasons, and the shifting realities of cultural and socio-political life. His inspirations range from Iranian artistic traditions and classical Persian literature to the abstract expression of Cy Twombly.
Shaqayeq Arabi received her bachelor’s degree in Graphic and Visual Communication from Al-Zahra University (Tehran, 1996), followed by a BFA from the University of Valenciennes (France, 2001) and an MFA from Sorbonne University (France, 2003).
Her interdisciplinary practice deploys painting, sculpture, and immersive installations grounded in sensory experience: image, sound, scent, and emotional atmosphere. Arabi often incorporates found objects and natural materials, including metal mesh, wire, paper, twigs, film, glue, plants, wood, and paint. She values their dual capacity to bend under pressure yet resist it. For the artist, these materials resonate with the precarity of life in the Middle East, embodying both vulnerability and endurance.
For further details about Improvisations, please visit the exhibition’s official webpage.
You might also be interested in visiting The Only Way Out Is Through: The Twentieth Line.
