My painting explores the threshold between matter and emotion — the space where flesh becomes spirit and spirit seeks form.
Each work is a trace of passage, not a fixed image but a process of becoming. Like a camera, painting captures what cannot be seen directly: the fleeting impressions between feeling and form, memory and presence.

For me, painting is an act of exposure — a dialogue between the body that acts and the spirit that observes. Every gesture is a shutter release, an attempt to fix a moment of inner light before it fades. The observer, in turn, reactivates that moment, allowing the image to breathe again through their gaze.

Between Flesh and Spirit is a meditation on duality and connection — on how vulnerability, silence, and desire inhabit both the body and the unseen. These works do not seek resolution, but reflection: to dwell in the luminous space between the physical and the transcendent.

ARIAN Nowbahari, artist

Arian Nowbahari’s exhibition immediately captivated me with its ability to make the viewer feel alive through a deeply poetic concept.
His paintings, in a neo-expressionist style, reflect duality on multiple levels: the inner tension within the artist as both a creator and a thinker, the interplay of reason and emotion, and the dialogue between the physical and the spiritual.
 
What fascinates me most is the way he presents body and spirit not as opposites, but as intertwined forces. The paintings act as portals, an interface between his emotions and those of the viewer – as if two beating hearts, or two streams of blood, merge through the canvas.
In this sense, there is almost a “third body” created between the artist and the viewer, where this mixed blood circulates – a space that embodies both flesh and spirit simultaneously, complex and alive.
 
The question that continues to linger in my mind is: what if we swap flesh and spirit?
 
What if the pigments themselves contain their own spirituality, and the spirit is embodied in the physical?
In that case, the exhibition becomes not a separation, but a continuous flow – a meditation on how corporeality and transcendence coexist, and how our perception bridges the two.
 
This idea has left a lasting impression on me, inspiring reflection on the fluidity between body and spirit and the profound ways art can awaken both.

Natalija Strahinić, Art curator