Exhibitions

Farideh Golbahar’s work emerges from a place of memory—personal, cultural, and sensory. Her flower paintings are not merely botanical depictions, but echoes of a distant childhood, of gardens rich in color and fragrance, and of a visually abundant culture absorbed in her early home. A chance encounter with a photograph of a blooming garden reignited this inner image, becoming the نقطة of departure for a painterly journey moving between past and present, between one culture and another.

In her paintings, two worlds converge: Persian culture—with its precise ornamentation, patient decorative quality, and richly detailed ornamental tradition—and the Israeli landscape, with its bright light, wildness, and open space. Their meeting is not conflictual but organic; it unfolds layer upon layer, like a living texture of memories, colors, and brushstrokes.
The influence of Impressionism is evident in her treatment of light and color, in the fleetingness of the moment, and in the dissolution of form into free patches. Alongside this is a pull toward expressive abstraction—a physical, rhythmic, almost musical movement—in which the flower ceases to be a recognizable object and becomes an energy spreading across the canvas. Within the dense pictorial weave, one can sense an affinity with the intense fields of Jackson Pollock; yet in Golbahar’s work, the movement is not merely a heroic gesture—it carries within it the memory of feminine labor: diligent, repetitive, cyclical.

This sense of repetition recalls traditional handicrafts—embroidery, weaving, interlacing—where patience and recurrence build a complete image from small units. So too with her flower paintings: they accumulate into an abstract fabric whose boundaries blur between nature and decoration, body and landscape, intimacy and open space.

The exhibition invites the viewer to wander through a garden that is not only a physical place but a psychological territory—a garden of memory and migration, of roots and re-rooting. Among the layers of color and free gestures, a story of layered identity emerges: an ongoing journey between a rich Persian heritage and a contemporary Israeli reality, where the flower is at once symbol, memory, and a living, breathing painterly language.