London-based Iranian artist Fa Razavi paints astonishing sculptural bodies and a desire to interrogate the gaze and limitations we impose on them. “Opera Rose,” now on at Palo Gallery and curated by Kollectiv Collective, includes a succession of narrative images contained behind a chromatic veil of haunting hues. These include baby pink and eerie viridian that together create a phantasmagorical décor and atmospheric stage to propel imbricated characters and scenes in eight large-scale paintings.
The show opens with Opera Rose (2025), in which three characters stand on a plinth. One of them shatters the fourth wall to directly stare at the viewer, her legs defiantly open, while the others symmetrically extend their hands to two acolytes on the floor as if trying to rescue them. The implication is they’re fighting an invisible force that has kept them down, and the use of pink could allude to the glass ceiling that most women and minorities struggle to break.
“When I began to paint, I relied on what I knew about art in terms of sculpture,” Razavi tells Observer, alluding to attention to form, depth and volume that make her paintings feel very third-dimensional and erect.
Opera Rose’s theatrical arrangement nods to the aesthetics of an artist’s studio with the inclusion of sheets and props. The characters “model” for us, the viewer, placing us in the position of the painter (a similar composition features in Session, 2025). There are also subtle references to canonical works such as Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819) and Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, with dainty fingers that elongate to give life. Here, Razavi explores the classical nude and non-binarism (one subject is intersex) as well as the tension between representation and voyeurism in a dramatized expression—themes that form a common thread across her paintings.
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Razavi mixes tenderness and violence in tableaux infused with Baroque and Renaissance extravagance. In Laundry (2024), infants look up to adults, a pregnant woman holds the empty space created by the shadow of an AK47 and a smudged sweep creates a suffocating choke. The full range of human existence is on display, from cradle to aging silhouettes, reflecting on the cyclical experience that exists outside the artificial boundaries of past, present and future. In this world, Razavi says, the figures meet and overlap: “There is no clear start or end. I don’t think we have a definitive beginning or conclusion in life. Age happens in a cycle. Maybe one of these kids in one painting becomes an adult in another painting.”
Chiaroscuro-infused scenes emerge out of a dream-tinted uncanniness. Outside the semblance of the artist’s studio, characters are immersed in domestic life, such as in No Place Like Home (2025), a viridian-dominated triptych that exposes the invisible labor of women and their caretaking responsibilities. Razavi also places her subjects in more surreal environments—realms where their mass and assembly morph into the mechanical, asking us to view the human body as part of a larger whole of depersonalization, role-shifting, dramatic chaos and hellscape-ish confusion.
Green is a significant “heavy” color for the artist and one that embodies much of her expressive journey. “I would call it ‘sweet revenge’ somehow. It’s the color of my past, the color that I saw growing up [in Iran],” she says. “It reminds me of the rules I had to navigate.”
Our walkthrough begins with the lightness of Opera Rose’s pink and progresses to the imposing recesses of this moody green, yet Razavi composed her body of work in reverse, starting from a place of negotiating her green memories toward what she calls a healing “shift” one morning as she worked overnight on Opera Rose. Simplifying her palette allowed her to focus on the emotion being conveyed, which creates a synesthesia-like aura for each painting.
The artist inscribes resistance in her depictions of naked figures—female, intersex—and channels mythology as a storytelling device. The gracefulness of a Venusian woman befriending a dove in Mothers “Victory” battle scene (Snakes and ladders) from 2024 is contrasted with a more contemporary vignette of a mother trying to find privacy and peace on a toilet seat in No Place Like Home (2025). Can women exist beyond these extremes?
The works offer a range of symbolism and wider social commentary on movements in her native Iran, such as the women-led “Women, Life, Freedom” protests that have erupted across the country following the brutal death of 22-year-old Jina (Mahsa) Amini in the hands of Iran’s morality police in 2022. And there are certainly traces of this context. In Untitled (2024), characters climb on a cube whose shape reminds one of the Kaaba located in the great mosque of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. One of them, an ethereal figure holding a soft veil, dances on top of the cube: she’s free, she’s radiant, almost bacchanalian. (Iranian women have defied the morality police by dancing publicly in solidarity with the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement.)
Razavi’s use of a colorful glaze dressing her paintings hints at the mandatory hijab covering, of course, but also more largely at the presence of a veil of truth, artifice and dissimulation in our lives. In many ways, Razavi’s characters are captive to the painting’s frame and to our eyes, but we sense that they want to leap forward and out. In each painting, at least one figure sustains our observation as if conscious of their own performance and makes us acutely aware of that staged illusion.
“The timing of the series was never meant to be present,” Razavi adds. Beyond an initial, literal reading of her work as an attempt to defy gender roles and attributes in Iran, many of her paintings resituate humans within a fantastical genealogy where spectral characters inhabit a spiritual world. This invites cross-cultural conversations and dialogue, such as with the mythical renditions of contemporary artists Naudline Pierre or Sara Anstis, at a time when two other Iranian artists, Reza Aramesh and Ali Banisadr, also question the human figure and narratives in their latest shows (“Fragment of the Self” and “Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist” respectively).
In “Opera Rose,” Fa Razavi delivers a compelling meditation on form and modern mythology via an exploration of the classical nude and human archetypes. Letting her brush paint a glowing subconscious, Razavi examines the various molds used to fabricate an image—a narrative. The notions of mother, child, and maiden are sublimated and transcended through a life force that lingers.
“Opera Rose” is on show at Palo Gallery, New York City, through May 3, 2025.
