Leaning into the ordinery, 2025

This painting examines the spatial and emotional weight of the everyday. Through the use of flattened planes, unmodulated color, and disrupted perspective, Leaning into the Ordinary questions how ordinary spaces can hold quiet intensity. The scene — a figure at a table, a dog nearby, the residue of conversation — is distilled into blocks of color that resist illusion yet invite intimacy. The composition explores the tension between connection and isolation, familiarity and estrangement. By emphasizing negative space and chromatic dissonance, the work transforms routine domesticity into a site of psychological depth. In its stillness, it asks how much of our emotional life unfolds in silence — and how meaning can surface through form rather than story.

I am Anahita Amouzegar, an Iranian-Australian artist whose work is rooted in memory, imagination, and the quiet reconciliation between survival and femininity.

After fleeing Iran as an asylum seeker and arriving in Australia by boat over a decade ago, I rebuilt my life from nothing. In that isolation, imagination became both a refuge and a heavy possession — shaping a deep inner darkness that I now seek to transform through painting.

My work explores the fragile meeting point between vulnerability and strength, often through figurative and dreamlike forms. Through color, gesture, and the intimate spaces between figures, I reclaim a feminine language that was once denied or hardened by the survival mechanisms of my past.

Influenced by artists like Picasso, Alice Neel, and Matisse,Christina Guarles, Suzanne valadon I strive to capture the raw, essential truths of human experience — the loneliness, the resilience, the hidden poetry of everyday life.

Painting is not only my refuge; it is my act of resistance, healing, and connection. In every work, I search for a space where memory and freedom coexist — where survival gives birth to beauty.