Samin Tofighi
The Everyday Sublime
Exhibition on view from 25 August to 5 September 2026
Vernissage: Thursday, 27 August, 6–9 pm
Ithaque presents “the Everyday Sublime”, an exhibition of paintings by Samin Tofighi, marking her first collaboration with the gallery. Samin Tofighi is a painter and holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Painting from the Art University of Iran. Her work centres on human experience, the observation of the surrounding world, and the situations encountered in daily life. Alongside her studio practice she conducts research in the philosophy of art, pursuing the relation between painting and thought.
“With every explosion the house shudders, and each time that tremor loses itself in the commotion of the city, as though it were one among the city’s thousands of daily occurrences. The experience of war in the twenty-first century differs from that of the past. War today has become so technological and complex that it seems like another foulness of contemporary urban life.
THE EVERYDAY SUBLIME (2026/03/08),
Oil on paper, 50 x 70 cm.
Under the shadow of such a war, where “being normal” can turn into an ethical question and where submitting to the everyday can itself become grounds for shame before the violence underway, the field of action between “what is to be done?” and “what can I do?” is reduced to its minimum. Continuing to live, then, is not only justified but is itself a form of resistance.
Samin Tofighi, moved by a similar question, has turned to the manifestations of war in the urban landscape and has depicted her own life under these conditions as an artist. [Her work] is a search for what binds us to life, for what reminds us of living: beauty.”
- Excerpts of curatorial text by Jamal Arabzadeh,
Dean, Faculty of Visual Arts, Art University of Iran
THE EVERYDAY SUBLIME (2026/03/05),
Oil on paper, 50 x 70 cm.
Biography
Samin Tofighi is a painter and holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Painting from the Art University of Iran. Her work centres on human experience, the observation of the surrounding world, and the situations encountered in daily life.
Alongside her studio practice she conducts research in the philosophy of art, pursuing the relation between painting and thought. Her master's thesis examined the emergence of truth in the work of Van Gogh through Heidegger's framework, a line of research she continues to develop. Her recent series, focused on images of war and explosion, explores the relation between beauty and catastrophe.
In these works the explosion is not only an image of destruction but a moment in which light, colour, and visual splendour stand alongside violence and annihilation. This duality leads her to ask what exactly we are looking at when we confront the image of an explosion: the beauty of light and colour, or the reality of destruction behind it.