Nicky Nodjoumi - Chaos

Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present Nicky Nodjoumi’s (b. 1941, Kermanshah, Iran) artwork spotlight, highlighting his compelling 1989 painting, Chaos.

Nodjoumi’s figurative language explores the mediation of images drawing upon history, social observation and mass media to create layered, allegorical scenes where power and psychological tension unfold in ambiguous and occasionally absurd compositions. In Chaos, a series of disparate vignettes are brought together within an impossible and fractured landscape. Drawing upon surrealist compositions, vivid colour and expressive brushwork operate as destabilising forces, resisting narrative clarity in favour of a visual logic shaped by rupture. Meaning emerges not through resolution but through the accumulation and coexistence of lived histories.

Produced between 1988 and 1989, Chaos functions as a psychological landscape shaped by Nodjoumi’s reflections on the decade following the Iranian Revolution and his subsequent exile. Having returned to Tehran in 1978, Nodjoumi was involved in revolutionary activity, establishing a poster workshop at the University of Tehran and moving through the streets alongside demonstrators, sketching scenes that would later inform his murals, Reports of the Revolution. After the fall of the Shah, his work was soon condemned, leading to his flight from Iran in 1980 and the abrupt dismantling of his retrospective at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. In this painting, images drawn from memory, newspapers, and photographs collide without fixed meaning. Figures, symbols and fragments overlap and interrupt one another, producing a sense of dislocation that mirrors the artist’s own experience of forced migration.

Contributing to the work’s sense of geographical dissonance are motifs of beach ephemera and seaside foliage. A beach ball hovers in the sky while balloons rise incongruously amid surrounding turmoil. A towering palm form cuts through the composition, its limp fronds rendered in reds and browns, wiry and imposing rather than idyllic, emerging from the very chaos it reflects. Following his exile from Iran, Nodjoumi lived in Miami, and traces of that environment surface here as memories of home intersect with the decadence of the Floridian landscape. 

In the lower left corner, a cluster of figures operate as an audience. Rendered as a faceless crowd, they are positioned not as participants but as witnesses to the sequence of disjointed events unfolding before them. Their bodies are oriented towards the spectacle yet remain inert, suggesting a collective posture of observation rather than agency. Nodjoumi collapses political and absurd imagery into a continuous visual field, positioning the viewer within the same logic as the painted crowd. In this way, the work implicates both its internal audience and the external viewer as witnesses to Nodjoumi’s charged vignettes of memory, offering a glimpse into the artist’s own psychological state as he looks back across recollections of his life.

Nodjoumi situates himself allegorically within the work through the figure of the female painter at the centre of the composition, shown painting an abstracted male body in red. Rather than a self-portrait, this gesture acknowledges the vital role women played in the Revolution while placing the artist in a doubled position as both subject and viewer of his own image. By adopting this displaced viewpoint, the artist reflects on his role as both participant in and observer of revolutionary experience, filtering political history through a personal and psychological lens.

The word chaos derives from the Greek kháos (χάος), meaning a vast chasm or gaping void that existed before the formation of the universe. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, khaos stands in opposition to order, describing a primordial state of instability and suspension. In this sense, Nodjoumi’s painting can be read as an image of a disordered “before”. Looking back from exile, the artist renders a psychic terrain shaped by upheaval and rupture, using the canvas to process the events of the preceding decade that continue to press upon his consciousness. Viewed from the present moment, as Iran once again faces widespread protest and state violence, the work resonates with renewed urgency, articulating chaos not as a singular historical event but as a recurring condition that underscores the cyclical nature of revolutionary struggle and the enduring psychological toll borne by those who witness it.