Sale Sharifi | "Disinterested Dwellers"
+2 is pleased to announce “Disinterested Dwellers”, a solo exhibition of recent works by Salé Sharifi opening on May 15, 2026. The exhibition will continue through June 5. A collaboration with The Mine, “Disinterested Dwellers” is the artist’s debut solo exhibition with Dastan. It includes works on canvas and paper, as well as the artist’s recent experiments in hand-painted ceramics. “Disinterested Dwellers” is curated by Ashkan Zahraei.
In Salé Sharifi’s work, the surface declares itself first. Beneath the bold applications of paint, a fine-grained haze persists, softening without dissolving, a muted ground upon which sharper, more voluminous forms emerge. In the underlaying background, edges hesitate. The image gathers, then loosens. What appears is held in suspension, neither anchored nor entirely elusive, as though the image were arriving at itself in slow intervals. It does not yield at once. It entails duration.
In speaking about these paintings, Salé Sharifi draws on a precedent that situates itself firmly within the narrative discipline of Persian painting: the illustrations of Sani al-Mulk for One Thousand and One Nights, a labor extended over seven years, dispersed among some thirty to forty artists, and gathered into six volumes containing one thousand, one hundred and forty three illustrated pages, each animated by sequences of three or four images. Within those pages, the narrative unfolds with a certain lightness, at times discreetly comical, as though the image were obliged to keep pace with the tale. It is a continuity shaped by accumulation. Each scene leans into the next.
Still in line with his previous work in terms of narrativity, Salé Sharifi’s recent efforts introduce a drastic shift as now it is scale that asserts itself as the central condition. Enlarged to near equivalence with what they depict, the images demand span. Narrative, once carried forward through sequence, slows down to a point of near stillness. It settles into a condition of pure presence. The absence of any figures reinforces this withdrawal from anecdotal representation; what remains is neither vacant nor resolved, but held in a state of quiet tension. Curtains introduce a new element, not incidental but structuring, lending the space a measured theatricality, as if the scene had become conscious of its own enclosure. The artist almost seems to be stepping back, allowing columns, frames, and apertures to assume and fulfill their role. The constructed nature of what is seen is thus both acknowledged and accentuated. This moving away from sequence to setting, from narrative trajectory toward a sustained, almost atemporal present, finds a parallel in the artist’s reflection on Jean Chardin’s account of Persian gardens, where culturally informed differing modes of attention reveal divergent frameworks of experience. To sit, as understood by the Safavids and subsequently the Qajars, is to allow space to condense, to draw inward around a point of repose and conversation. To wander, which Chardin believed to be an early eighteenth-century century European practice, is to unfold space through movement, to encounter it in parts, sequentially. The distinction remains subtle yet crucial. In these paintings, stillness prevails. Space is not traversed but gathered. It rests, with a certain inevitability, in the act of looking.
In landscapes of such sheer scale, one might expect images offered in their entirety, a kind of eyeful spectacle, available at once and without resistance. In the paintings of Salé Sharifi, this expectation is quietly disrupted. The image remains visible, even insistently so, yet it withdraws at the same time, held at a slight but decisive distance. The blurring effect enacts this sense of separation, but it functions not so much as an obscuring device than as a condition of access. What appears furthest away presents itself first. Only gradually does the framing assert itself. Curtains most notably, then columns, at times a fence, surround the scene, not to clarify but to delimit. These interiors do not differ in sharpness or clarity; their distinction is structural, governed by a subdued logic of perspective, closer to a linear order than the optical depth of a lens. Space is not deepened so much as arranged. It is held in place. As attention detaches from the distant view, another layer emerges, one seeming nearer to the surface and almost incidental in scale. Sudden and intensely vivid spots of paint begin to determine the experience of distance itself. A shift occurs, a subtle one that nevertheless alters the whole. That’s how distant and duration are maintained: by exploring the truth behind the compositions in layers.
The setting of the exhibition aims to extend this movement. It proceeds as if following along a view from an interior setting toward the threshold of a balcony and then to a fragment of the exterior, a fountain, a view towards an extreme, a voyeuristic look into a distant world.
* This press release was edited by Ashkan Zahraei, Negar Karimkhani, and Zahra Rostamian based on input provided by the artist as well as first-hand research. Generative AI products have not been utilized in writing this piece.