Hedieh Xanali

Hedieh Xanali, born in Tehran in 1971, holds a Bachelor's degree in painting from Azad University, Tehran Central Branch. She began her artistic journey with painting and, in recent years, has explored other artistic mediums such as sculpture, contemporary jewelry, and experimental printmaking. Xanali has a distinguished artistic career, including six solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions both in Iran and abroad. In her paintings, her figures represent a new approach to figuration: some of these figures, exaggerated and in a large-scale, embody solitudes that have been suppressed in artistic expressions throughout history. In fact, by disrupting the aesthetics of form, she presents a type of body that has been rewritten and reproduced in the processes of society, politics, and economics. Thus, the body is not merely an aesthetic form but the entirety of human presence in the world. In her depiction of nature and landscape, Xanali's gaze moves beyond mere representation toward revealing multiplicity and sometimes even a state of stasis, which can also be seen as metaphors for human life. Her heavy, concrete sculptures exhibited at Vali Gallery exemplify this theme of hardness and stasis, which also governs the life of living things. Xanali has also been active in the field of contemporary jewelry and wearables. In fact, similar to her paintings, she focuses on the body and the tensions it experiences when adorned with jewelry, considering jewelry as a medium of expression that creates new constructions of the tensed subject.

Sohrab Ahmadi