In 2026, Künstler:innenhaus Bremen presents Anita Esfandiari’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. The artist’s painterly practice centers on figures and bodies, often rendered in unconventional forms and captured in moments of movement or transition. For the project Buoyant Dribble, Esfandiari started with a found photographic source depicting young people playing basketball, translating it into largescale, sculptural paintings. Each frame functions as a record of a fleeting moment, carried forward through continuous shifts in image, landscape, and motion. By fragmenting an existing image and extending it into a sequence within a sculptural painting practice, Esfandiari explores how broken gestures and scattered narratives can suggest new ways of understanding transformation. Rather than unfolding in a linear way, time, history, and agency emerge through layers, ruptures, and repetition.

At the center of Esfandiari’s paintings are marginalized bodies and ephemeral moments of everyday presence and proximity. The works demonstrate how imagination, visibility, and small digressive and transgressive acts of creation can generate counter-narratives. These forms of resistance may not always be immediately visible, yet they remain enduring and consequential: self-assured and vulnerable, and sustained through connection with others. Such embodied relations of everyday presence function both as motifs and as conceptual foundations of Esfandiari’s practice, operating as powerful modes of expression in their own right. The depiction of bodies in motion and their sequential interaction thus signifies not only leisure or play, but also a claim to space, a questioning of normative structures, and an appeal to shared presence.

Anita Esfandiari was born in Tehran, Iran, and graduated from the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2022, where she studied under Prof. Judith Hopf. Prior to that, she studied painting, at Art and Architecture - Islamic Azad University in Tehran. Working across sculpture, painting, and video, Esfandiari has exhibited at SculptureCenter New York (2025), Frankfurter Kunstverein (2023), Opelvillen Rüsselsheim (2020), Abi Gallery and Delgosha Art Gallery, Tehran (2020), and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. Anita Esfandiari currently lives and works in Berlin.

Curator: Marie Oucherif

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