“Threshold” is Qader Mansouri’s first exhibition with Assar Art Gallery, presented in
collaboration with Bavan Gallery at Bavan’s exhibition space.
The exhibition brings together 17 large- and small-scale oil paintings on canvas and five small oil
paintings on cardboard, selected from four years of Mansouri’s practice in Meshginshahr, in
northwestern Iran, following his return from Tehran to his hometown. Together, the works form
a multifaceted painterly account of his everyday lived experience and of the people among
whom he lives.
Drawing directly on the landscape surrounding him—mountains, trees, plains, and
clouds—Mansouri places figures within collective situations such as weddings, celebrations, and
ritual or superstitious ceremonies. Transformed through his painterly imagination, these
elements become melancholic and often uncanny spaces.
His use of layered colors—mature and nuanced, yet at times transparent and sharply
defined—and his compositions of people engaged in collective acts that are simultaneously
familiar and elusive create scenes that invite the viewer into a distinctive pictorial language.
Across these scenes, themes such as dialogue, mourning, love, death, and play unfold.
In developing his visual narratives, Mansouri also enters into pictorial dialogues with works from
art history that address related themes. For those familiar with the history of painting, these
encounters offer a playful and thought-provoking approach to the tradition. House, for example,
was created in dialogue with Arnold Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead, while Whisper No. 1 engages
in a pictorial dialogue with Gustave Courbet’s Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet.
“Threshold” is the first body of paintings by Mansouri to expand significantly in scale in relation
to his earlier work. Here, he has sought to merge the details he approaches more freely, simply,
and intuitively in his drawings with the techniques of painting. Combined with the playful
experimentation evident in his collages, these elements come together to form images that give
shape to the conceptual and visual concerns of his mind and imagination.
Although “Threshold” emerges from a specific geography and personal lived experience, it
does not intend to remain confined to them. For the painter, what he sees around him becomes
a point of departure for engaging with broader human experiences: death, loss, mourning,
solitude, togetherness, and, ultimately, the celebration of being alive.
Qader Mansouri, born in 1991 in Meshginshahr, Ardabil, holds an MA in Painting from the Tehran
University of Art. This is his third solo exhibition. Over the past decade, he has participated in
more than twenty group exhibitions in Iran, the United States, Italy, Mexico, and Turkey, and has
received awards at both domestic and international festivals.