Night Gallery is pleased to announce Tickles, Dance, and Goosebump Blooms, a presentation of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Nasim Hantehzadeh. This is the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Across this new body of work, Hantehzadeh continues their practice with intuitive precision, interweaving personal history and cultural memory through mark and movement. After years of working with oil on canvas and linen, the artist is embracing acrylic as an additional medium to explore softer, more gestural territories. Hantehzadeh’s works emerge not from sketches but from a deeply physical engagement with the canvas—motifs appear through immediate, somatic responses, their meanings crystallizing as the works unfold.

In works like the acrylic-on-linen Snowflakes Falling into The Ocean of Poppies (2025), fluid brushstrokes layered with speckles of paint recall the artist's memories from Iran, where they found solace in swimming. Through goggles, Hantehzadeh observed a myriad of colors within the water’s surface, inspiring this work. The privacy of the artist’s pool, which existed within their family’s home, offered a safe haven from the outside world, where their body was objectified and politicized at a young age. While Snowflakes could conjure that repressive period, the artist refuses such readings, offering instead respite and momentary joy.

The forms found in Hantehzadeh's large-scale compositions draw from the artist’s research into matriarchal and gender fluid practices in pre-colonial cultures, particularly those of the Mayans and ancient Persians. In Swinging Left (2025), an abstracted sky lays low above a chaotic underground scene. Deep purple meets kaleidoscopic forms which crawl like organisms beneath a microscope. Bright, earthy tones gesture toward nature's healing capabilities. Here, Hantehzadeh draws inspiration from Persian miniature paintings of the Shahnameh, a patriarchal text reimagined by the artist through a queer lens. Fantastic creatures remain emotionless mid-battle while surrounding flora respond through exaggerated motion. The plant-like figures appear involuntarily caught in distress, their movements becoming the emotional language of the work.

The exhibition's largest piece, You Are Safe in Your Bed (2025), spreads across four paper panels as a poignant response to the loss of civilian lives during wartime. The artist describes this work as embodying both collective dream and scream: screaming from fear while dreaming of safety. Orifices, genitalia, and breasts recur throughout much of Hantehzadeh’s work, here interconnected and framing the composition. The work’s red background confronts while vibrant, playful colors highlight the work’s emotional complexity.

Hantehzadeh’s newest body of work functions as a living exercise, where larger meanings emerge through the artist's engagement with the world beyond their studio. The exhibition title evokes the full spectrum of physical sensation—from pleasure, to fear, and finally to wonder—which Hantehzadeh channels into visual form. Tickles, Dance, and Goosebump Blooms serves as both release and purging of patriarchal histories while envisioning life beyond them. These compositions, while acknowledging difficulties within both the past and present, breathe and twirl with the possibilities of healing.  

—Tina Barouti

Nasim Hantehzadeh (b. 1988, Stillwater, OK) has had solo exhibitions at Nina Johnson, Miami, FL; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Paramo Galeria, Guadalajara, Mexico; Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, CA; and others. They have participated in group exhibition at The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; Nina Johnson, Paris, France; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Wonzimer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Paramo Galeria, Guadalajara, Mexico; ET al, San Francisco, CA; and other galleries and institutions. In 2025, they will present a solo exhibition at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. They are based in Los Angeles, CA.