Open Space #18 Armineh Negahdari

As part of its Open Space program, the Fondation Louis Vuitton presents, in Gallery 8, the first solo exhibition by Armineh Negahdari (1994, Iran) at an institution in France. It takes place on 15 April 2026 at 8:00 AM at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

Graduated from the University of Tehran and the Clermont-Ferrand School of Art, she is now based in Bordeaux, where she develops a practice focused on drawing. For this exhibition, the artist presents a new body of drawings in various formats, created over the past months.

For Armineh Negahdari, drawing is more than a language: it is an experience, a way of life that answers an urgency, an immediate need. She works without prior planning, in the intensity of a flow where the hand, guided by intuition and hesitation, precedes the idea: the mark emerges, driven by a physical commitment that gives rise to images as strong as they are fragile, in search of what she describes as “a physicality as credible as a body, as powerful as a mountain.”

Each support—paper, cardboard, canvas—becomes the stage for a tension between that which oppresses and that which resists. Marks, reworkings, rubbings and erasures record the energy of the gesture as much as the image itself. Traversed by opposing forces, strokes, lines and points—drawn in charcoal, oil pastel, graphite or oil paint—are captured in full momentum, in a raw emotion where desire, vulnerability and resistance surface.

Ubiquitous, the human figure is unstable, shifting, sometimes dislocated, at times occupying only a tiny portion of the sheet while the remainder of the surface remains unmarked. Negahdari’s silhouettes testify rather than narrate: ambiguous, infused with tensions, without narrative resolution, balanced between light and shadow.

The artist distrusts the certainty of words and claims a form of the unsayable close to poetry—not to illustrate, but to be experienced: her images trigger an emotion, evoking visions in which shifting forms “move from the human body to fruit, then to landscape, passing through the animal. Anything can metamorphose before our eyes: a head becomes a fig, a mountain turns into a breast, hands become wings that become flowers. Words alter images. If I had to choose, I would always favor the image.” Her work draws on multiple references but remains firmly rooted in the present and in lived experience.

Curators: Claudia Buizza and Ludovic Delalande (Fondation Louis Vuitton).