"Gravity and Grace," 2005
Oil on clay coated paper
26"x 22"
Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94
Estimated value: $1200
Starting bid: $300

Born in Tehran, Iran in 1974, and emigrating to the United States as a child, Laleh Khorramian received her undergraduate education at the Rhode Island School of Design and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago before receiving her masters degree in Fine Arts at Columbia University in New York, where she continues to live and work. Khorramian has trained in painting, film and printmaking. For the past ten years her work has centered on theater and the spectacle as its point of departure, to explore aspects of human nature and emotional states, and the possibilities of drawing as a medium.  

Her most recent work combines animation and drawing in order to capture and emphasize particular stages of the art-making process. Khorramian uses traditional media—drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, assemblage and sculpture—along with film, and stop-frame animation to create a series of paintings on paper and stop-frame animations based on the five basic elements; air, water, fire, land and ether.   In these images everyday scenarios are subverted and de-familiarized through technical interventions (enlarging, erasing, redrawing) in order to uncover a deeper level of human experience—to ponder the slippery bounds between experience and the imagined, the real and the ethereal. While her stories seek to bring out the mythical and imaginary, they also aim to humanize it, and to place it within the everyday.