Gallery Isabelle
Artists, curatorial team, advisors, and partners connected to Gallery Isabelle.
Artists
Represented and guest artists exhibiting with the gallery.
Alaa Itani
Alaa Itani is an artist whose practice centres on landscape, light and perception. Working primarily in reverse glass painting, he applies ink to glass and then selectively wipes and erases the painted surface, allowing clouds, air and sky to emerge through acts of subtraction. Light passing through these transparencies casts shadows and doubles of the image, so that his horizons and blurred landscapes appear at once present and elusive. Rather than depicting specific places, Itani approaches the horizon as a recurring condition — something perceived but never reached — and treats landscape as an experience of temporal displacement.
Tirdad Hashemi
Tirdad Hashemi (b. 1991, Tehran) has been drawing for as long as they can remember. Growing up in an environment where personal and emotional difficulties were rarely voiced, drawing became a way to say what could not be spoken, and this reliance on image-making as communication still shapes a practice that has moved from coded gestures to more direct forms of address. Hashemi's largely figurative works are rendered with crudeness and immediacy, favouring honesty over polish and returning to the intuitive visual language we all spoke as children. Grounded in lived experience, the drawings foreground queer embodiment and togetherness, recording the everyday negotiations and acts of care that become political when lived in a queer body. Titles drawn from a long-standing letter-writing practice extend the drawings and make their messages explicit. Collaboration is central to Hashemi's work. The ongoing Flower series, developed with their partner Soufia Erfanian, grew out of a period spent growing and tending plants: layered oil pastel compositions in which flowers, as symbols of resilience, surround characters drawn from the artists' circle of loved ones, reflecting on how care and mutual support are sustained under precarious conditions.
Soufia Erfanian
Soufia Erfanian is an artist who works collaboratively with her partner Tirdad Hashemi on the ongoing Flower series. Executed primarily in oil pastel on paper, the drawings are built from loose, gestural marks in which flowers — symbols of resilience — bloom around intimate scenes of friends and chosen family sitting together, embracing or simply sharing space. Rooted in the artists' shared experiences and accompanied by poetic titles drawn from a practice of letter writing, the works consider what it means to care for, sustain and grow alongside one another.