In Elham Mohammadi Nezhad’s paintings, the body is rarely a complete, self-contained form. It is divided by colour, crossed by lines, joined to roots or set against structures that appear to press upon it. These interventions do not erase the figure. They make visible the experiences through which a person changes: intimacy, motherhood, inherited expectations, vulnerability and the effort of defining oneself. For Mohammadi Nezhad, the body is both a physical presence and a place where less visible histories can be felt.
The artist’s background helps explain the clarity with which she constructs an image. Trained in graphic design and experienced in photography, she brings a strong awareness of framing, contrast and negative space to her figurative painting. Her figures are often simplified into decisive shapes, while the areas around them carry equal compositional weight. This gives the work an immediate visual force, but its meanings develop more gradually. A block of colour may first appear decorative before beginning to suggest a division within the self, a surrounding pressure or a space of protection.
The Pillar establishes a central concern of the practice. The back of a human figure becomes a vertical structure, its spine marked by short, rust-coloured strokes while roots spread through the lower body. There is something architectural about its upright form, yet the roots make that apparent solidity dependent on connection and growth. The marks along the spine might suggest vertebrae, stitches or a record of what the body has carried. Their ambiguity gives the painting its psychological charge: strength appears alongside vulnerability, rather than concealing it.
This tension between structure and vulnerability runs throughout Mohammadi Nezhad’s work. In Roots of Memory, a yellow line travels down a torso broken into darker geometric pieces. It appears to bind the figure together, but it also draws attention to the divisions it crosses. The body becomes a surface on which rupture and continuity are visible at once. Her recurring roots, seams and botanical forms should not be read as fixed symbols with one meaning in every painting. Their significance changes according to what surrounds them. A line may suggest repair in one work and exposure in another.
Motherhood is one of the most sustained themes in the portfolio. In Womb Within, a woman holds an infant close while small, separated squares of colour occupy the space beside them. The closeness of the figures gives the painting an intimate centre, but the fragmented field complicates any idea of motherhood as a single, complete identity. The woman remains a person with a life extending beyond the embrace. Becoming places a pregnant figure among larger geometric forms, making a private bodily change feel inseparable from the structures of the world around her. In each painting, Mohammadi Nezhad acknowledges tenderness without reducing the maternal figure to it.
The question of what it means to hold another person recurs in Mother – Shelter and Held. Both works use closeness as a central gesture, yet neither presents protection as an effortless state. In Mother – Shelter, the embrace forms a small enclosure within an upright composition. Leaves rise around the figures, suggesting growth while emphasising their dependence on one another. Held is more fluid: two bodies draw together within warm colour and botanical lines. The boundary between them becomes less distinct. Mohammadi Nezhad finds emotional complexity in that uncertainty. To hold someone can offer safety, but it can also make one’s own vulnerability newly apparent.
Her treatment of identity extends beyond the maternal body. Between Faces shows a woman surrounded by suspended mask-like forms. Their separation from her face is crucial. They may suggest roles offered by others, roles she has inhabited or versions of herself that remain available but unresolved. In Many Selves, overlapping fields of colour divide the profiles of a woman and a child. Their closeness adds another dimension to the painting’s shifting sense of identity, suggesting how relationships across generations shape the self. These paintings make visible a central proposition in Mohammadi Nezhad’s statement: identity is formed and re-formed through experience. The work does not promise that the fragments will eventually fit together into one definitive portrait.
The artist is especially attentive to the relationship between figures and the spaces they occupy. In Threshold, a small seated figure rests within an opening formed by the body of a much larger bowed woman. The arch is both architecture and person. Her posture suggests care, yet her scale also makes the smaller figure appear vulnerable. Within places a curled body inside a lighter space bordered by angular planes. Its enclosure could suggest retreat or the protection needed for change. In both paintings, Mohammadi Nezhad allows shelter and constraint to coexist, leaving their relationship unresolved.
Although the human figure anchors most of the portfolio, White Forest shows that her concerns can extend into a landscape. Pale trunks divide areas of black and warm colour, creating a space that feels difficult to enter or see through. The painting carries the same interest in concealment and interruption found in her figures. Here, however, the viewer occupies the uncertain position usually given to the painted subject: looking for a way through a structure that alternately reveals and obscures. This departure suggests a promising means of developing her visual language beyond the body while remaining close to its emotional concerns.
In Unveiling, the woman looks down and places both hands around her pregnant belly. The gesture is intimate and protective, directing attention to her relationship with the unborn child. The coloured sections dividing her figure suggest that pregnancy changes more than the body’s outline: it is an experience held within a complex, continuing sense of self. In Silent Strength, Mohammadi Nezhad turns from the human figure to a horse emerging from dense white marks against black. Its energy is contained within a still image. Together, these works widen her exploration of strength: it can appear in a deliberate act of self-disclosure or in a presence that does not need to announce its power.
Mohammadi Nezhad’s practice also includes photography and graphic design, although the supplied portfolio concentrates on painting. Her more than ten years of professional photographic work are visible as an influence on composition rather than a licence to describe the paintings as photographs. Figures are often held against carefully organised grounds; an edge, a cropped shape or an area of open space changes where our attention falls. This discipline helps the work retain clarity even when a body is divided into numerous colours and forms.
Mohammadi Nezhad’s progression draws on more than a decade of professional photography, including running a studio and teaching image editing. That experience, alongside her training in graphic design, informs the considered framing and visual structure of her paintings. Based in Dubai, she has exhibited in Iran and the UK, including Elsewhere, Here in Birmingham and Sights Within in Isfahan. Her solo exhibition of illustrations, A Fragment of Being, at Vasmeh Gallery in Izeh offers another setting for her exploration of identity and the fragmented figure. These presentations show an artist extending established skills in image-making into a distinctive figurative practice and bringing that work to audiences in different locations.
Across the portfolio, Mohammadi Nezhad has developed a recognisable language of simplified figures, interrupted surfaces, botanical growth and constructed space. Its continuing challenge is to let those elements remain responsive to each particular painting. When they do, the work moves beyond a familiar vocabulary of symbols. The figure becomes a site of genuine tension between what is carried internally and what can be seen. Her paintings ask how a body holds love, pressure, change and memory, and how it might continue to become itself through all of them.
