Mobina Nouri: Cosmic Dance

ADVOCARTSY is proud to present Cosmic Dance, Mobina Nouri’s second solo exhibition at our gallery. The departure point for this show is Nouri’s previous series A Thousand Tales. Continuing her characteristic hand-drawn, densely-detailed acrylic and oil based ink on canvas, this series takes on a much more universal scale while still alluding to Persian lore and mystical wisdom. Each piece features multiple iterations of the feminine form, and Nouri surrounds those forms with natural and cosmic elements that create deep visual and ideological context and suggest a grand yet intentionally enigmatic narrative.

For this series Nouri widely deploys the sacred shape of the circle, and taps into its power on a number of levels. Visually, the circles serve to ground the dynamism that pulsates from the figures and Nouri’s endlessly undulating lines. Philosophically, the ubiquity of the circles evokes the postmodernist idea of multiple centers, while from a more spiritual perspective it alludes to the mystical notion of finding the divine everywhere and in everything.Together with the everpresent bodies-in-motion, the circles also conjure the traditional Sufi whirling dance known as Samā. In the Samā, the dancer revolves around their own axis, echoing the motion of celestial bodies and creating an energetic vortex intended to connect the heavens and the earth. The circular motion also represents the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth, a reflection of the eternal, immortal, infinite nature of existence.

All of these themes converge in Nouri’s paintings, rendering them profoundly meditative and ultimately joyful. Collectively the series can be regarded as a melding of the physical and the spiritual; a synthesis of physiology, mythology, and cosmology that invites the viewer to see existence through a wholistic lens. As such, the paintings become representations of life itself -its myriad forms deeply intertwined and interconnected, all of them infinitely engaged in a neverending cosmic dance. They call to mind this verse from the great Persian poet Rumi:

Divine wisdom claps, setting the beat;

and every particle,

all of existence,

dances.

Statement by Omid Arabian