HEONG GALLERY -SOHEILA SOKHANVARI 'WE COULD BE HEROES'

I Will Greet The Sun Again Portrait of Pouran Shapoori a great Iranian actress with five films and 100 songs to her credit.

Heong Gallery presents a stunning show of work by the Iranian exile Soheila Sokanvari.. Vibrant and assertive this remarkable collection of paintings and prints is a triumph for an often too-quiet gallery, tucked away just inside Cambridge University Downing College’s rather stern gates. Once you confront a blizzard of signs that wag a headmasterly finger at visitors -don’t cycle, drive walk on the lawn or make a noise- you can be easily put off. Persevere. Just one swift left turn past the formal Porter’s Lodge with its guardians, and you’re in to the Kingdom of Art where the rules simply melt away. Never moreso than for this artist

Born in Shiraz in Iran, her world turned upside down in 1978 when as a 14 year old at a private school in England, the islamic revolution took over. It was, she says, the end of her childhood and the collapse of the Iran she knew.

Conquest of the garden, 2016_Painted in memory of Forough Farrokhzad a feminist poet , note the Islamic references in the patterns and tiles, but also the design of desperate women’s arms waving within the pattern.

“ Most of my art is about a bygone era., a fifty-year anomaly in the long history of Iran. It is about death, the physical loss of life, the silencing of women and the death of my childhood.. Of my icons some have died twice, once at the end of their natural lives, and the second time through the erasure of their memory .In remembering them, I also remember the danger they faced in pre-1979 Iran, for challenging patriarchy and stepping outside the limits of acceptable female behaviour. I celebrate them as much for their poise and elegance as I do in their sassiness and sensuality- for their courage then and for the example they can set to Iranian women of the possibility of changes.

These tributes come with the bitter knowledge that young women and men in Iran are still losing their lives and liberty for protesting against mandatory hijab and state brutality ,but these ‘icons’ fought for their right to live life on their own terms , and for a brief moment, they succeeded.”

Soheila Sokhanvari_Cowboy Ali,

Sokhanvari’s father was. a model and actor. He then became successful in the making of upscale Western clothes and suits. So much of her work links to her family. These two images are part of that theme. Above her father as hero, done in the painstaking medium of egg tempura. She also grinds her own colours and creates her paintings from scratch for a vivid brilliant effect .Vellum is her paper of choice with its timeless quality . she wants her paintings to last as monuments to her subjects , just as ancient manuscripts survived on vellum surfaces. Below is a quite different method.

Crude Oil Miniature Series (1978), Soheila with her father

What a change in medium .The picture above of the artist with her father is done in - symbolically - crude oil . She smuggled half a litre in hand luggage on a flight to Heathrow from Tehran. That fact alone shows how easily oil is transported without challenge - typical artist, she uses the real thing to make her point. The painting in oil - helped by turnpentine- ranges from nearly opaque blacktop pale washes. Since its discovery in 1908 crude oil has changed Iran . It was behind the overthrow ( aided by the British) of a democratically elected government in 1951 - and crude oil underpins the hated Islamic règime of today. Hard to handle, this is where the artist has chosen to make her stand, far from the beautiful range of colour and texture of her other paintings created for timeless endurance..

She's a Rainbow(Portrait of Shoorangiz Tabatabaee)2023 She appeared in her first films under the stage name Shaparak with many films to her credit. After the Islamic revolution she was imprisoned in the infamous Evan Prison and forced to sign a letter of penitence . Her famous films are The Maid and An Aristocratic Beggar .

This is an exhibition not to be missed although I think it would be better titled Women Life Freedom after the cry of the protesters against the savage death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard

‘Mum on Chair’ Soheila hasn’t seen her mother since 2012