Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles is pleased to announce ‘The moon stamps her image’, a solo exhibition by Sara Issakharian. Presenting new works by the artist, the exhibition furthers her meditations on the psychic life of trauma that ripples across Middle Eastern communities left in the wake of religious violence. Drawing imagery from a range of mythological traditions, Issakharian’s world unfolds like chaotic battle scenes from an epic poem that she describes with an almost childlike sensibility. In her work, chimerical creatures, contorted bodies, and heaps of wreckage coalesce into undifferentiated masses to explore dark themes of sexual predation, fanaticism and terror. Her otherworldly tableaus serve as a vehicle to comprehend the enormity and senselessness of events in the present. By using myth to seek meaning in the incomprehensible, Issakharian’s work calls to mind the theory of mythopoeic thought, namely the hypothesis that ancient people personalised the world in a manner wholly unfamiliar to us moderns in the present. Rather than see their environment shaped by impersonal forces, ancients saw themselves within a world teeming with life where anything from a sudden cool breeze, an unexpected clearing in a forest, or an eerie silence was unmistakably an act of will by a divine agent. The mythopoeic point of view saw the supernatural as imminent to the phenomenal world, and thus life was always a conversation between people and their environment. In turn, Issakharian’s work aims to recapture this worldview. Working as if like a reporter, her paintings expose scenes where people, animals, and environments are all bound up in forces of light and dark. Sara Issakharian (born in 1983 in Tehran, Iran) lives and works in Los Angeles. Issakharian studied philosophy and sociology at UCLA before completing a master’s degree at the New York Academy of Art in 2015. She was the recipient of the first round of awards for the Art Olympia Prize in Japan in 2015. In 2020, Issakharian was the subject of a solo exhibition, titled ‘Open Window’, at the prestigious Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. She has recently been included in group exhibitions at Site131 in Dallas, Texas; Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York; ‘Think Pinker’ (curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody) at Gavlak, Los Angeles; and ‘Coming Across: Expression and Empowerment’ at Analog Diary, New York. She was featured at the Walker Art Center’s premier Avant Garden Benefit Auction in 2022. Tanya Leighton presented Issakharian’s first solo exhibition, ‘There’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there’, in Los Angeles in 2021 and ‘Behold mother, I make all things new’ at Tanya Leighton, Berlin in 2022. Her work was recently on view in ‘Elsewheres’ (curated by Zuzanna Ciolek) at UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles. A new large-scale installation of her work is forthcoming at the Jewish Museum, New York opening in March 2024. Issakharian’s work is held at the Art Collection of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business; the Nasher Collection,Texas; and numerous significant private collections internationally. For more information, please contact info@tanyaleighton.com or telephone +49(0)3021972220. Image: Sara Issakharian To be titled, 2023 Detail