Saba Farhoudnia: Forsaken with a Side of Pickles

Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani

September 2025

In the body of work, specifically created for the solo exhibition at Fou Gallery, New York-based Iranian artist Saba Farhoudnia continues to explore the complex relationship between human presence and natural forces, as these two opposing elements interact and unfold within urban and post-urban landscapes. What happens to a museum or a monument when they are fully abandoned, and if it rains for the whole year? What is left of us when we are gone? The artist explores these questions, creating multilayered sanded gesso canvases using acrylic and alcoholic ink to mark composite points of no return. Yet, Farhoudnia uses humor and a light-hearted undertone to suggest that we still be there, albeit the perspective is uncertain and details are hard to predict. We are not fully forsaken if we can still find a plate of pickles at one of these picnics on view at the gallery.

Some of the masterfully drawn architectural references we encounter on the canvases have concrete physical references, such as the Azadi Tower in Tehran or an abandoned sanatorium in Tskaltubo, Georgia. Then the artist asks herself how these places would look if they were abandoned and how they would look if a human presence is suggested through an Impressionist masterpiece or an anthropomorphic animal. Human or animal presence suggested through airily drawn ephemeral figures does give hope, yet, also considers romanticized idealization of ruins and beckons us to reevaluate it.

In the 19th century, the Romantic school of painting took a violent view of natural forces, where extreme circumstances occurred and were largely outside of our control. Animals and landscapes painted by Théodore Gericault, J.M.W. Turner, or Eugène Delacroix were not to be tamed by mere mortals. Yet, the philosophical construct of the Enlightenment, with its scientific, reserved logic, won the minds. It followed the traditional strand of Christian thought, according to which we are full masters of the universe and the Garden of Eden was given to us. When we see the environmental destruction caused by our shortcomings and greed, we are reaping what we sowed. Saba Farhoudnia’s ephemeral canvases and subtle washes of crimson and cobalt beg us to reconsider and to go back to the earlier Romanticist ideals, to maybe reevaluate our path and the role in trying to force our ways, and to leave our marks.

The natural process analyzed by the artist is almost presented in reverse. Pristine nature gives way to cultural landscapes and ornamental augmentation by gardening, which, if fully left to its devices, creates what could be a new form of natural organization. The mutated ecosystem is no less vibrant or complex; it is simply following a different natural order. As much as the Zone described by the brothers Strugatsky in Roadside Picnic, a novel that has influenced Farhoudnia’s thinking about these works, the newly created landscapes might have uncanny qualities and even might help to regenerate the harmony we have long lost.

Farhoudnia’s works give us an ample opportunity to experience mystery and humor alongside a pure aesthetic pleasure of reveling in a subtle color palette and the complexity of Anthropocene landscaping. She creates a novel approach to a discourse on what is to be found in 300 years from now. We would all love to eat some crunchy pickles while gazing at Monet’s Waterlilies, won’t we?