LAST CHANCE Amirhossein Bayani: The Season of Ruin’s Remembrance

Iranian artist Amirhossein Bayani’s vividly coloured and highly detailed landscape paintings s explore themes around life, immigration, and freedom. Each of the paintings in this series was inspired by a real-life story of an Iranian woman who fought for freedom and lost her life; but rather than illustrating heroic or tragic stories, Bayani envisions these figures in other-worldly forest settings – they appear memorialised as statues or translucent spirits, glimpsed between the trees, standing on a rock or on the edge of a lake. There’s an eeriness to the scenes: the shades of green are vivid to the point of being luminous, the foliage so dense it creates a wall, blocking out the light. “This tension between beauty and horror, for me, describes the struggle for emancipation,” says Bayani. “It all depends on your perspective.”