Raha Farazmand, The Centre Never Held

20 June - 19 July 2025

Paintings by Raha Farazmand at No Show Space, 2025
Raha Farazmand, The Centre Never Held, installation view at No Show Space 2025.
Oil painting by Raha Farazmand of figures in a landscape
Raha Farazmand, The Centre Never Held, 2025. Oil on Canvas, 185 x 135 cm.
Installation view of paintings by Raha Farazmand at No Show Space in 2025
Raha Farazmand, The Centre Never Held, installation view at No Show Space, 2025. L to R: Post-Production, 2025. Oil on Canvas, 60 x 42 cm. Cow Down, 2025, Oil on Canvas, 60 x 46 cm.
Oil painting of figures in landscape by Raha Farazmand
Raha Farazmand, Post-Production, 2025. Oil on Canvas, 60 x 42 cm.
Oil painting by Raha Farazmand of figures and animals in landscape
Raha Farazmand, Cow Down, 2025, Oil on Canvas, 60 x 46 cm.
Installation view of paintings by Raha Farazmand at No Show Space in 2025
Raha Farazmand, The Centre Never Held, installation view at No Show Space, 2025. L to R: Cow Down, 2025, Oil on Canvas, 60 x 46 cm; Conceptual Ghost, 2025, Acrylic on Canvas Board, 30 x 21 cm.
Painting by Raha Farazmand of figures using Acrylic on Canvas Board
Raha Farazmand, Conceptual Ghost, 2025. Acrylic on Canvas Board, 30 x 21 cm.
Installation view of paintings by Raha Farazmand at No Show Space in 2025
Raha Farazmand, The Centre Never Held, installation view at No Show Space, 2025. L to R: Eruption, Meltdown and Sugar Rush, 2025. Oil on Linen, 70 x 50 cm; A Fable Without Furniture, 2025. Oil on Canvas, 70 x 60 cm.
Oil painting by Raha Farazmand of abstract figures merging with a landscape
Raha Farazmand, Eruption, Meltdown and Sugar Rush, 2025. Oil on Linen, 70 x 50 cm.
Oil painting by Raha Farazmand of 4 figures in landscape
Raha Farazmand, A Fable Without Furniture, 2025. Oil on Canvas, 70 x 60 cm.
Installation view of paintings by Raha Farazmand at No Show Space in 2025
Installation view of paintings by Raha Farazmand at No Show Space in 2025. From L to R: Non-transcendentally Figurative 3, 2025 Soft Pastel on Pastelmat 24 x 30 cm; Non-transcendentally Figurative 2, 2025 Soft Pastel on Pastelmat 24 x 30 cm; Non-transcendentally Figurative 1, 2025 Soft Pastel on Pastelmat 24 x 30 cm
Painting by Raha Farazmand of figures in landscape using Soft Pastel on Pastelmat
Raha Farazmand, Non-transcendentally Figurative 1, 2025 Soft Pastel on Pastelmat 24 x 30 cm
Painting by Raha Farazmand of figures in landscape using Soft Pastel on Pastelmat
Raha Farazmand, Non-transcendentally Figurative 2, 2025 Soft Pastel on Pastelmat 24 x 30 cm
Painting by Raha Farazmand of figures in landscape using Soft Pastel on Pastelmat
Raha Farazmand, Non-transcendentally Figurative 3, 2025 Soft Pastel on Pastelmat 24 x 30 cm

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.