NYAB Event - Roya Farassat "A Mirror Has Two Faces"

Roya Farassat "A Mirror Has Two Faces"

Leila Heller Gallery

This event has ended.

The first ever solo exhibition of work by Iranian-born, New York-based artist Roya Farassat, A Mirror Has Two Faces, will present Farassat's large-scale steel sculptures, exhibited alongside intimate paintings and works on paper.

Born and raised in Iran, Farassat's work has been largely influenced by a culture and tradition that she feels embraces a distorted sense of reality. As a result, Farassat's work embodies a desire to break free from social and cultural constraints, and explore one's inner self freely. Farassat explains, "I have made the image of a veiled woman with a devil's horn as a metaphor for exploring issues that focus on hidden identity, cultural ambiguity, suppression, and sexual objectification."

In her large-scale steel sculptures, Farassat continues to explore her psychology, creating objects that are undeniably disconcerting, due to their subtle references to body parts and organs. These sculptures at the same time project a quiet and delicate beauty, which seems contradictory to their sheer mass and scale. Farassat's work seeks to defy expectations and encourages unlimited interpretation.

Curator and writer David Gibson writes in an essay, "The paintings that fill Roya Farassat's solo exhibition "A Mirror with Two Faces" present a variety of symbolic portraits that reflect the repressive social conditions in her homeland of Iran and the psychological repercussions that have resulted from them. What begins as a form of social critique gives way to a pantheon of ciphers and phantoms that are iconic and pathetic, expressive and opaque. We can view them alternately as a reflection of ourselves, or of a world in which we do not belong."

Roya Farassat received her BFA at Parsons School of Design in New York, and later attended the Sculpture Center School from 2000-2001.