Raha Farazmand, The Centre Never Held

No Show Space is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Iranian artist Raha Farazmand.

The Centre Never Held probes the fragility and mutability of allegory in painting. Farazmand combines the abstract and figurative to examine how meaning, once rooted in specific cultural, political, or moral contexts, becomes unstable over time and is revealed as a precarious construct, shifting and fragmenting across time and culture.

These evocative paintings are in control of what is revealed and what is left to intrigue and suggestion. This tension is achieved with an understanding and deft handling of the medium, whether oil on canvas or pastel on paper.

Farazmand’s work stages a dialogue between the monumental theatricality of Peter Paul Rubens’ Baroque canvases and the narrative subtlety of Kamal al-Din Behzad’s Persian miniatures. Behzad and Rubens were both court painters who served expansionist empires: Behzad under the Timurids and later the Safavids, and Rubens under the Spanish Habsburgs and various Catholic monarchs. Both used images to support imperial authority, though their approaches and cultural frameworks differed.

Farazmand situates these historical works within contemporary anxieties about media representation and the distortions of meaning in today’s visual culture, where a single image fractures into competing interpretations, echoing absurdity and ambiguity. Through these transregional and historical parallels, The Centre Never Held reveals a body of work that traces the erosion of fixed meaning, questions the authority of the image, and invites multiple, even contradictory, interpretations. Revealing painting itself as a site of negotiation, slippage, and critical possibility.

Farazmand’s works have been exhibited both in the UK and internationally, including Metamorphika London (2024), Christie’s in London (2022), The Royal Drawing School (2022), the Sydney Architecture Festival in Australia (2019), the London Festival of Architecture (2017), The Architectural Association (2017), and the Winterpalais Belvedere Museum in Vienna (2015).

Raha Farazmand, born in Tehran, Iran, in 1983, lives and works in London. She completed The Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School in 2022 and qualified as an architect in 2017 having studied at the Architectural Association, London and Yazd University, Iran.