Realism interrupted: Mahrokh Mofid Nakhaei

I first came across Mahrokh Mofid Nakhaei's work at 'Peripheries', a group exhibition in Oldham's 1853 Gallery and Studios. They had a dark gravity which was both soothing and enigmatic. Intrigued to know more, I visited the artist in her studio and took a look at her most recent work where we talked about it at length.

It is said that feelings appear before thoughts. We can be overwhelmed by a wave of nostalgia or seized by sudden rage, only for conscious thought to rationalise the experience moments later. Mahrokh Mofid Nakhaei's paintings live in this exact interval: her quiet interiors and solitary still lifes are loaded with profound feeling and leave us with questions long after we look away.

Mofid Nakhaei is a Manchester-based painter, originally from Iran. She holds an MA in Painting from the Manchester School of Art and was part of the 2025 cohort of the Apollo Painting School in 2025. Her work has been shown in many recent exhibitions around the country, which is how I first came across her cinematic compositions.

She works predominantly in oil paint, with a preference for a darker palette broken by streams of bright light. The paintings often employ trompe-l'œil elements and depict rooms that were once inhabited and now hold remnants of human presence: boxes; balloons; scraps of paper; empty picture frames.

Most recently, the compositions are spread across multiple canvases displayed around corners and edges of gallery walls, a staging intended to create an immersive, film-like viewing experience. There are figures too - nude women feature in some of the larger compositions - but due to the paintings’ modular nature, these sections are sometimes removed so that only the canvases devoid of actual human presence remain on display.

Finding ways to imbue a painting with this emotional weight is an ongoing process that pushes the development of Mofid Nakhaei’s work into new and exciting realms

What started as a love affair with drawing and figuration has now developed into a search for tension. Mofid Nakhaei’s excellent draughtsmanship very much underpins her current practice, but it is the feeling, rather than literal subject, that stands at the forefront of her artistic exploration.

Within the works, there are literal references to the artist’s own experiences of migration and homesickness, as well as looser paths to interpretation. On a personal level, the objects she chooses as her subjects function as anchors: “things that hold memory, comfort, absence, and a sense of continuity when place itself feels unstable” - in other words, they are amulets that conjure a sense of home. 

These multi-canvas installations are an exercise in claiming space too. Leading the viewer around a section of the gallery means that the paintings generate something of an energetic field that goes beyond passively standing in front of the canvas. Here, the artist is reaffirming home as a fragmented space, both physically and emotionally, creating a “temporary or emotional home inside the gallery”.

One could suggest that subjects like a cardboard box filled with water glasses, (in the process of being unpacked, perhaps?) and a large roll of bubble wrap unravelling on the floor are clear allusions to the process of uprooting one’s life. But what of the little blank pieces of paper taped to the wall? Balloons, usually a symbol of celebration, sit heavily on the floor as if weighed down - are we seeing them before or after a party? What about the empty frames and the small, illegible handwriting? 

To look at these paintings is inseparable from asking what they’ve actually captured, and why the encounter feels so uncomfortable.

In Mofid Nakhaei’s own words: “The subjects in the paintings are like words in a sentence for me. I use them to build a visual language, but I don’t want the meaning to be too fixed.” She frequently refers to the process of interruption - realism is a tool to lull the viewer into a false sense of familiarity which is immediately interrupted by a lack of narrative clarity and deliberate concealment. Installing the works around corners contributes to this; having to physically move around to see the entire image interrupts it in order to provide a gradual reveal. To look at these paintings is inseparable from asking what they’ve actually captured, and why the encounter feels so uncomfortable. It's also not simply a case of feeling astonished by a trompe-l'œil apple almost falling out of the painted basket but rather an experience more akin to stumbling into an immersive, out-of-context film still. 

Despite the interpretive openness of these works, the artist’s key concern is memory, in all of its fractured and fraught emotional nature. Speaking of her own experiences and life in Iran, she explains: “Of course that history is part of me, but I want the feeling of loss, pressure, and absence to be experienced through space, light, and objects in a wider way. (...) I don’t want the viewer to need that exact background in order to feel the work.”

Finding ways to imbue a painting with this emotional weight is an ongoing process that pushes the development of Mofid Nakhaei’s work into new and exciting realms: “My current question is: how can I speak about sadness and fragility in the most painterly way? Not only through what the image shows, but through how the painting is made.” 

Here, we come to a crucial point - are these, at first glance, realistic paintings actually a slow-motion vanishing act? While her current practice is anchored in trompe-l'œil realism, the logic of her inquiry into memory and the preoccupation with process suggests a trajectory where the object may eventually dissolve entirely. Perhaps the next stage is an altogether more abstract approach, with colour and light taking centre-stage, away from a recognisable subject. After all, we see glimpses of this already in the individual canvases that make up the larger installations.

The power of Mofid Nakhaei's work lies in its ability to conjure up an atmosphere that seeps out of the canvas and infuses the air around it

There are no strict limitations to what realism can achieve when it comes to capturing a feeling but the painting process is, by definition, more restricted when rules must be followed to achieve a likeness. By dismantling these stylistic constraints, a shift toward raw formal experimentation could perhaps liberate the emotional weight that these spaces hold even more. On the other hand, the power of Mofid Nakhaei’s work lies in its ability to conjure up an atmosphere that seeps out of the canvas and infuses the air around it; a phenomenon driven by her expert understanding of light, which will always have its roots in close observation.

While the exact evolution of her practice remains unpredictable, my reading of her current work suggests an artist at a pivotal point - watching how she negotiates the tension between representation and dissolution will be essential viewing.

Maja Lorkowska-Callaghan is a writer based in Merseyside, 24th June 2026