Flowers first became important when primates fell in love with them because of their spectacular beauty and then stood on their feet in flower fields after becoming herbivores. Nahid Behboodian and Neda Ghayouri’s duo show of their drawings and paintings seeks to distill and immortalize the nature that is always on the verge of going out of existence and transformation: on the one hand, Nahid wanders, like an adventurous kid in those very same fields. She observes, and occasionally, she even dares to pick a few flowers. Neda Ghayouri, on the other hand, searches for a cure for the boredom of being away from the lush nature of her hometown through the thin, texture-like lines of her works. Nahid Behboodian and Neda Ghayouri were first introduced in “Episode” group shows in Mohsen Gallery.

Pursuing the age-old human desire to immortalize beauty, Nahid Behboodian in “Nanjinganthus Dendrostyla” series, with finesse and painstaking attention to details, captures the seductive beauty of flowers on paper like a fossil inside a rock, without emphasizing a particular technique. Representing the concepts of life and death, which are, to her, inseparable twins, was made possible in the past by giving life to recycled materials and making papier-mâchés. Here, however, she conceals the dichotomy in the accumulation of colorful flowers in large-sized diptychs. Nahid’s series is inseparable from each other: the works are like the petals of a flower that only make sense together in an evolutionary process, while they still maintain their individual qualities.

Throwing the audience into the mass of leafy branches of plants and the furs and feathers of living things, Neda Ghayouri in “The Remains” series, reminds the audience to reconsider things. She also seeks to recount the complexity and entanglement of plants and their relationship to each other as well as the space that is formed between them. In Neda’s monotypes, in which deliberate and ecstatic textures are engraved on vintage papers, nature is not as much manifested by colors as in a wide field that opens up for the self-expression of fine lines. Her work is an invitation for an immediate encounter with nature, which seems to be forgotten. It seems like capturing a moment before madness; a borderline between tranquility and turmoil in that forgotten nature. It is a state of bliss that may be thrown into tumult by the hands of mankind, or by nature itself, at any moment.

With curiosity, both Nahid and Neda set out to immortalize a space that they find necessary to represent, not only for themselves but also for the people whom have forgotten the nature, their eternal refuge, due to their everyday distress.