Between Utopia and Vanitas: Worlds by Mahsa Tehrani and Emilie Picard

Between Utopia and Vanitas: Worlds by Mahsa Tehrani and Emilie Picard

This exhibition brings together two contemporary painters, Mahsa Tehrani (b. Tehran, Iran) and Emilie Picard (b. France, 1984), whose practices reveal the tension between beauty and rupture, freedom and constraint, utopia and vanitas.

Tehrani constructs radiant worlds of possibility, reimagining life beyond the boundaries imposed on women in Iran. Her figures wander through luminous, otherworldly landscapes that recall both the fantastical realms of Persian miniatures and the allegorical expanses of Hieronymus Bosch. Yet the utopia she creates is shadowed by reality: her subjects, dressed in muted, uniform-like garments, carry the weight of captivity even as they inhabit landscapes of liberation.

Picard, by contrast, turns her gaze to the ruins of contemporary life. In large-scale canvases where objects act as protagonists, she stages psychological dramas filled with both levity and unease. Toys, clothing, and everyday remnants are transformed into vanitas symbols—modern echoes of a long tradition that reminds us of the fragility of existence and the inevitability of loss. Her cracked, fragmented surfaces make visible the impermanence that underlies human striving.

Together, Tehrani and Picard offer two complementary visions. Where one dreams of escape and transcendence, the other confronts the fractures of the present; where one seeks a horizon of possibility, the other insists on the limits of mortality. In dialogue, their works create a profound meditation on the contradictions of contemporary life—its hopes, its wounds, its beauty, and its impermanence.