Fariba Ameri: an Iranian Artist in Los Angeles

The Beauty of Inner Truth is the title of the interesting exhibition of the Iranian artist Fariba Ameri, that, opened on July 13, you'll find until next September 1 at the main Hall of the JNA Gallery of the prestigious Bergamot Station Art Center in Los Angeles: the exhibited works explore the emotional complexity of women through the ages; using mixed media, strong contrasting colors, and animated brush strokes, her work has an intense physicality. Drawing upon Persian and other mythological themes, symbolic objects (both painted on the canvas and/or embedded), Ameri highlights the contrast between what is seen and what is hidden. As she herself said: "I search for a balance between the spontaneous and the preconceived, the decorative and the profound, the darkness and the light". Her subjects are both symbolically autobiographical as well as an investigation of the human soul through a female lens, transforming personal items, jewels, fragment pieces of old paintings and paper into objects of renewed beauty and great power. The mysterious and evocative faces that peer back from Ameri's canvases challenge the traditional notion of a woman's identity solely represented through her physical beauty. Fariba Ameri has lived for most of her youth in Iran; she was born in 1959 in Tehran into a multicultural family of Russian, German and Iranian origins (her father was born in Germany, her grandmother was a Russian. They both survived WWII, her grandmother also lived through the Russian Revolution; Ameri, herself, witnessed the Iranian Revolution), having finished her high school education in Leysin American School in Switzerland, she moved to the United States to attend the University.

"During my childhood we all spoke Farsi in the house and celebrated Norouz, Persian New Year; I studied Persian poetry and literature but I also learned to celebrate many different religions and cultures. Living in Iran for the first seventeen years in the 1960's and late 70's has definitely made me an easterner with a western twist. And now, having lived in the United States for the past thirty years, I have been infused with so many other valuable principles and cultures that I can hardly separate one from the other". Fariba Ameri makes own the words of Virginia Woolf: "As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world". And adds: "I believe that I am a part of a larger world that surpasses nationality and religion".

Fariba Ameri began to paint at age 14, enchanted by a book about Vincent van Gogh's life and fell in love with the emotional intensity of his paintings. Freedom of self-expression and respect for individualism are the two fundamental principles explaining not only the art but also the person of the artist precisely on the basis of her history; Commenting on her works of the exhibition, Ameri said: "Each painting might tell a story of a woman at a different time or cultural setting, yet all of the paintings are connected through the challenges women face in overcoming a duality, which seems to be timeless and for all ages". Many of her subjects, like herself, are immigrants: "We could all be considered immigrants of the world, women and men alike, in search of our own destiny. We cannot survive time but our stories will. This is how we become immortals".

For more information:

http://www.faribaameriart.com/

http://jnagallery.com/