Tasha Amini

Tasha Amini’s work offers focused and meditative responses to imagery. She develops her paintings from photographs, some of which are personal and others that are found and anonymous. Amini does not work with a specific theme or set of motifs, but rather is drawn to her subjects on an intuitive level. In her paintings she tries to capture this psychological resonance. In Untitled Amini renders a portrait of a woman, inserting a hairdo where the face should be. It creates a sensation of absurdity and muteness that’s both humorous and menacing.

Dora Marr was a surrealist photographer who was Picasso’s lover for ten years. Untitled is inspired by a photograph Marr took of Picasso. Amini renders this scene as a multitude of undulating lines, their endless repetition and skewed perspective reverberate an uneasy power. In her painting Amini has transformed Picasso’s body to that of a woman to further add to the sense of ambiguity.

“I’m often drawn to images of very beautiful women because they’re barriers; they have personal significance for me,” says Amini. “My work doesn’t celebrate femininity, but suggests an uneasiness about femininity and women that are really successful.” In Untitled Amini presents a woman’s face obscured by an arrangement of flowers. It evokes a contradictory beauty. The poetic and fragile motifs are made to seem strangely crude and concrete, rendered with thick brush strokes and reduced colours.

In Untitled Amini renders a close-up of hair; a tiny fragment of a subject that, once fixed upon, transforms into the suggestion of a landscape. This collapse between intimacy and expanse plays an important role in Amini’s work and is reflected in her painting process. “I like the idea of figuring out how little you can put on a painting to make a painting.” Amini explains. “I love painting hair: there’s an intensity in the repetitive action and I can lose myself in doing it.”

Amini never works with a preconceived idea about her paintings, and each of her compositions is developed as a spontaneous and immediate response to her subjects. Untitled shows a woman in a stylised dress entirely constructed from colourful stripes. The pattern of the dress appears to grow out of the figure, surrounding her body like a positive aura or force.

Untitled pictures a figure in a wheelchair. When making this painting Amini was thinking about confinement and repose, and imagined the figure staring out of the window for hours lost in her own daydreams and thoughts. Amini relates this feeling to the experience of painting alone in a studio. Amini executes this scene in soft, almost translucent colours that lend an air of transience and physical intangibility. Throughout her practice Amini engages with the sense of expansive psychological or internalised space. Her paintings visualise subconscious sensation and capture the reflective pauses within thought as a disquieting stillness.