Frieze Los Angeles 2026: Group Presentation

My work explores Iranian history and mythology through the depiction of humans, animals and landscapes both real and imagined. The figures in the paintings serve as architectural structures propping up narratives of identity, nationality and culture.  Woven into the paintings are a deep connection with nature and mysticism rooted in Iran’s pre-Islamic culture. 
 
Featuring figures loosely based on historical archetypes of kings, queens and magi, masked, anonymous and often hollow, each painting is a vignette that relates to specific, ancient and recent historic events in Iran, including the constitutional revolution of 1951 and the CIA backed coup of 1953.

Los Angeles based artist Aryana Minai’s paper based wall reliefs explore architecture as an intimate, bodily, and imaginative space shaped through memory, care, and making. Rooted in the handmade, her work considers how environments are built not only through structures and labor, but through softness, protection, and rest.
In her new body of work, Minai departs from the saturated pigments of earlier pieces. Rather than dyeing the paper pulp directly, color emerges through the slow, offset absorption of pigment from stained drop cloths used in previous works. These cloths carry the residue of earlier gestures, allowing whites, pale pinks, and muted blues to surface gently across the reliefs. The process introduces a quieter palette that reflects both material memory and emotional tenderness, as past works quite literally imprint themselves onto new forms.
Minai was raised in Iran, where her childhood bedroom functioned as a carefully constructed world. It was a place shaped by her mother’s labor and imagination. Hand painted wallpaper, a flower patterned curtain sewn and designed specifically for the space, and small domestic details transformed the room into a site of safety, play, and dreaming. This bedroom became an architecture of protection, a place where rest and sleep made imagination possible. For Minai, world building began there.
The works call back to earlier seed forms from her Life Forms and Nest series which reference the women’s life movement in Iran. Those seeds now find their way outward, evolving into three dimensional floral structures embedded within the reliefs. These flowers are formed from fragments of iron gates collected in Los Angeles, molded and softened through paper pulp. Materials associated with hardness, enclosure, and protection are transformed into delicate, blooming forms. What once functioned as barriers become sites of growth.
Paper remains central to Minai’s practice as a carrier of storytelling, tradition, and touch. The surfaces of the works are built through bricks and stones from buildings that no longer exist, woodblocks passed down through generations, fragments of vernacular decorative architecture, and the repeated presence of her fingertips. Architecture is understood as a living body, one that accumulates memory through use, erosion, and care.
At their core, these works are about rest. They ask what it means to feel safe enough to sleep, to dream, and to imagine new worlds. For Minai, dreaming is an act of construction.

Most of my paintings begin with something from my life in Los Angeles, a street at sunset, a parked car, a storefront window, a body in motion, a small moment that catches me. That moment becomes the core. I bring it into the studio not to document it, but to interfere with it.

I lived in Iran for most of my life, and that history shapes how I see and imagine. When I begin painting, memories, restrictions, emotional tensions, and long-term experiences from that life merge with the American image. I layer them together. I distort them. The painting moves away from realism, but it never fully leaves it. It still carries a trace of something real, pressured, altered, destabilized.

The body is present in my work, but not as a simple representation. It appears as compression, exposure, vulnerability, force. Visceral forms repeat across the canvases,sometimes sensual, sometimes confrontational. They are not planned symbols. They emerge through repetition and gesture. Over time, I’ve come to understand that they carry questions about power, control, desire, fragility, and endurance. They hold tension rather than resolve it.

For me, gender comes after agency. Before asking who a body is, I ask: who controls the space? Who is visible? Who absorbs pressure? Gender enters the work, but it is secondary to the structure of power operating within the image.

I paint quickly. If I overwork a painting, it loses its emotional charge. Hesitation produces politeness. I want the paintings to function like a small obstruction, subtle but persistent something that makes the viewer slightly aware of their own body again.

I am not interested in decorative beauty. I want the work to feel like a push-pin inside a shoe, small but impossible to ignore. Slightly uncomfortable. A quiet disruption.

The paintings are not narratives about Iran or America. They are about what happens to perception after living within different systems of control and freedom, about what remains inside a body. After struggle, vision sharpens. The work holds that sharpened gaze: alert, unsettled, persistent.