Parinaz Eleish Gharagozlou: Stories in Thousand Pieces

Leila Heller Gallery is proud to announce Parinaz Eleish Gharagozlou: Stories in Thousand Pieces, a solo exhibition on view from January 29th through March 1st, 2025. This exhibition showcases Gharagozlou’s captivating mixed-media works, which serve as mosaics of memory, storytelling, and political dialogue. 

Gharagozlou’s work presents a layered exploration of life’s intricacies, weaving together fragments of laughter, pain, memory, and hope. Her large-scale canvases draw viewers into a journey from afar, where bold structures and landscapes come into focus. Up close, they reveal a universe of details—hundreds of tiny pieces that tell their own stories and invite intimate contemplation. 

“Using mixed media allows me to build reality out of the many pieces,” Gharagozlou reflects. “The stories continue beyond the border of the canvas.” Newspapers, a recurring element in her work, act as witnesses to the passage of time. They guide and mislead, reflecting the complexities of life and the interplay of memory and history. 

Drawing inspiration from her observations of daily life, Gharagozlou’s paintings are imbued with an acute awareness of shared human experiences. The fragments in her work—shards of glass, newspaper clippings, and painted textures—represent the interconnectedness of people, places, and moments, forming a mosaic that speaks to universal themes of resilience, identity, and transformation. 

Through Stories in Thousand Pieces, Gharagozlou invites viewers to uncover the layers of her storytelling: “Close up, my painting communicates a different story than the one you saw from afar. It tells of the intricacies of our daily existence, the evidence of our past in our present.” 

Parinaz Eleish Gharagozlou is an artist and storyteller whose work bridges the gap between personal narrative and collective history. Her innovative use of mixed media and her ability to blend the political with the poetic make her a distinctive voice in contemporary art.