Sepand Danesh: ODRADEK

JD Malat Gallery London is proud to present ODRADEK, a solo exhibition by Iranian-French artist Sepand Danesh (b. 1984, Tehran), opening June 12th 2025. Featuring ten new paintings, ODRADEK expands Danesh’s long-standing inquiry into memory, identity, and the psychology of space.

At the heart of Danesh’s practice is the motif of the corner: an architectural form that becomes a metaphor for introspection, isolation, and the mind’s reflexive turns. In ODRADEK, corners are not merely compositional choices but conceptual anchors. They signal a space where fragments of personal and collective memory accumulate, where confinement gives rise to creation. These are corners without floor or ceiling, psychological zones suspended in time, dislocated from the familiar coordinates of place.

The title refers to Franz Kafka’s enigmatic short story The Cares of a Family Man, in which Odradek is a strange, ambiguous presence, neither object nor person, familiar yet unknowable. Danesh adopts this motif as a conceptual framework for exploring displacement, non-belonging, and the persistence of memory: a presence that lingers beyond reason or classification.

Rendered in acrylic on linen, the works in ODRADEK blend the formal clarity of geometric abstraction with the ambiguity of dream logic. Art historical echoes, including Surrealism, Constructivism, and French narrative painting, intertwine with a visual language forged from personal dislocation. Each composition becomes a site of quiet resistance, inviting the viewer to consider the architecture of their own thoughts.

With ODRADEK, JD Malat Gallery presents a poignant and philosophically attuned body of work that continues Danesh’s exploration of the corner as both refuge and rupture. It is a site in which the internal world is laid bare with rigour, tenderness, and intellectual clarity.