In Mohammad Hassan Nikbakht’s Calcium series, space and volume are rendered without the use of traditional perspective, creating a surprising sense of depth in the absence of illusionism. The artist’s abstract form is painted with soft edges and faint highlights that glow as the surface appears in gradating hues of white and green, making the depicted object appear to float within the composition. Nikbakht’s simple, isolated subject offers a meditative point of departure as the eye wanders across the seamless planes that blur foreground with background and an otherwise mundane object becomes aestheticised as a site of beauty.

  

 Born in Iran in 1982, Mohammad Hassan Nikbakht received his Bachelor of Arts in Painting from Elm o Farhang University, Tehran in 2009. A member of the Society of Iranian Painters (SIP) and the Institute for Promotion of Visual Arts in Iran, Nikbakht has held numerous group exhibitions in Iran since 2008, and his first solo exhibition, The Mushroom Series, was held in 2010 at Siin Gallery, Tehran. In 2013, Nikbakht exhibited for the first time outside Iran with the Magic of Persia’s Contemporary Art Prize Shortlist exhibition, which was held at the Emirates Financial Towers in Dubai.