Leila Heller Gallery in Dubai invites everyone to explore I Paint Your Grace, I Paint Your Pain, I Paint Love, a solo exhibition by acclaimed contemporary Persian-American artist Reza Derakshani. On display until 15 September 2025, it marks Derakshani’s first solo presentation in five years.
The exhibition seamlessly combines tradition, memory, identity, and abstraction, featuring newly exhibited works from three major interlinked series: The Hunt / Riders, Day and Night / Fig Leaf, and Migration / Grey Zone. In these paintings, past and present merge, as form, colour, and narrative intertwine in a profound meditation on the human experience.
Drawing inspiration from Persian miniatures and poetry, The Hunt / Riders channels the grandeur of medieval imagery and the artist’s childhood memories of northeastern Iran. Elongated horses, which symbolise freedom, pursuit, and existential purpose, gallop through these compositions. Here, the hunt serves as a metaphor for the never-ending human quest for power and transcendence.
The Day and Night / Fig Leaf series examines the interplay between light and darkness; the artworks evoke lush garden imagery and metaphors of paradise. Metallic pigments enhance the tension between the tangible and the metaphysical. These art pieces become spiritual meditations rendered in paint.
Meanwhile, the Migration / Grey Zone series engages with displacement, cultural identity, and the complexities of modern life, reflecting Derakshani’s journey between East and West. Abstract forms merge with figuration and incorporate motifs like turtles and map fragments to evoke memory, endurance, and the layered meanings of belonging.
About the artist
Reza Derakshani (b. 1952, Sangsar, Iran) is a painter, poet, musician, and performance artist. He graduated from the University of Tehran in 1976 and also studied at the Pasadena School of Art in California (USA), from which he graduated in 1978.
After experimenting with pure abstraction at the beginning of his artistic career in the 1980s, Derakshani developed his distinctive art style that blends abstract and figurative elements from Western and Eastern cultures. In his work, the artist explores the natural world, as well as emotional states and themes of exile and alienation. He builds up the luminous, textured surfaces of his paintings with a base of roof tar, after which he applies layers of colour and other materials such as gold, silver, enamel, and sand.
Derakshani has displayed his artworks in many exhibitions and art events, such as In the light of spring (Podgorny Robinson Gallery, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, 2018); Reza Derakshani (solo) (Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Germany, 2016); Shattered Mirror, Shattered Music (Metropolitan Museum, New York, USA, 2015); and the 6th Tehran Contemporary Painting Biennale (Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran, Iran, 2003), among others.
His works are held in multiple public and private collections, including the British Museum (London, UK), Weng Fine Art Collection (Germany), Collection of the Royal Family of Abu Dhabi, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Russian Museum (St Petersburg, Russia), to name a few.
To get more information about I Paint Your Grace, I Paint Your Pain, I Paint Love, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
You might also be interested in visiting an abstract art exhibition at the Kutubna Cultural Centre.
