Sepand Danesh | ODRADEK

12 June - 7 July 2025

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.
Sepand Danesh

Sepand Danesh (b. 1984, Tehran) is an Iranian contemporary artist based in Paris who explores identity, transformation, and the paradoxes of contemporary existence in our hyperconnected age. Employing Euclidean geometry, Danesh creates large scale compositions through painted cube shapes that generate pixelated forms, referencing our digital landscape whilst interrogating the psychological territories of displacement and belonging. Danesh's practice explores 'the dynamic of the Hub', examining how ideas burst forth and circulate in our interconnected world. The metaphorical Hub represents confinement, whether physical, cultural, linguistic, or existential to represent escape and transformation. Danesh's large scale canvases and no visible interior confinement offer a cognitive dialect due to the scale of the trompe l’œil compositions, inviting viewers to physically confront the psychological and existential states he investigates.
Sepand Danesh, Baigneuse, 2025, Acrylic paint on linen, 70 7/8 x 59 in, 180 x 150 cm

ODRADEK

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.
Sepand Danesh, G. Gould, J-S. Bach & the Murmur, 2025, Acrylic paint on linen, 70 7/8 x 55 1/8 in, 180 x 140 cm

Stripes and Imbalance

Drawing from literature, philosophy, and his own experience of exile following the Iran-Iraq War, Danesh constructs layered environments that suggest an ongoing effort to rebuild the self. Figures emerge as spectral presences: flattened, fragmented, or partially obscured. These are not portraits, but amalgams, vessels for collective memory, trauma, and knowledge. Many are drawn from historical texts, scientific diagrams, medieval manuscripts, and psychological theory, blending visual culture across centuries and disciplines. Danesh explores perception through two key visual devices: stripes and imbalance. Stripes, often charged with transgressive meaning in Western history, appear as symbols of rupture and resistance, while skewed or unstable perspectives disorient the viewer’s sense of space and logic. These visual strategies mirror the conditions of psychological fragmentation and displacement that underlie the work.
Sepand Danesh, Vermeer, 2025, Acrylic paint on linen, 65 x 78 3/4 in, 165 x 200 cm

Vermeer - Sepand Danesh

In Vermeer, the artist and his subject are rendered in fragments, pixelated and distanced. The painter paints. The woman waits. Between them, silence thickens. Light remains central, as in Vermeer’s originals, but here it is diffused through digital form. Memory, gaze, and authorship are all held in tension. This is painting within painting, not recreated but disrupted. Danesh reframes the past not as stable ground but as scattered recollection. The work becomes a corner of memory, consistent with the logic of Odradek, where clarity is always partial and history is rebuilt from shards.
Sepand Danesh, Fool , 2025, Acrylic paint on linen, 43 1/4 x 35 3/8 in, 110 x 90 cm

Constructivism

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.
Sepand Danesh, Paul Klee, 2025, Acrylic paint on linen, 74 3/4 x 47 1/4 in, 190 x 120 cm

Contemporary Identity

Through his distinctive visual language of painted geometric cubes and optical illusions, Danesh captures the fragmented nature of contemporary identity, where personal narratives intersect with collective memory in the digital age. His work invites viewers into spaces both familiar and strange, challenging us to navigate visual puzzles whilst confronting questions of belonging and transformation that define contemporary experience. The artist's large format canvases facilitate the detailed rendering of his signature grid systems, creating heuristic spaces that provoke reflection and embody the complexity of identity and memory.
Sepand Danesh, Self Portrait, 2025, Acrylic paint on linen, 63 x 51 1/8 in, 160 x 130 cm

Self-Portrait

In Self Portrait, Danesh disassembles the very notion of the self. The figure is fragmented beyond recognition, spiralling, incomplete, and visually scattered. A candle is held upright, a classical symbol of awareness or inner light. But its meaning here is unstable. Does it illuminate, or merely flicker in the void? This is not a likeness, but a confrontation, as if self-knowledge were both illuminating and destabilising. The radial background evokes a burst: a mental implosion or explosion, with memory, trauma, or insight made visible. Identity, as rendered by Danesh, is neither fixed nor whole. It is provisional. The work reflects the show’s larger structure, a corner of perception where memory stalls and the self, pixel by pixel, is both assembled and erased.
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.