Akhavan, Anahita

Anahita Akhavan is a painter based in Toronto, Canada. Her recent body of work depicts her fascination with the physiological changes that appear in the natural world due to environmental or genetic factors. She has been closely researching plants and flowers that genetically mutate and shapeshift due to a relatively rare condition called “Fasciation”. She also merges the concept of home and belonging in her works by painting Islamic architecture. It might read that the mutated plants and flowers are her ambiguous self that is living in nostalgia. Her recent abstract paintings are enlivened by a vibrant quality; their rhythm and warmth located in sensory experience, unbound from the rigors of formal thought.