Practices of Uncertainty: Curated by Samira Abbassy

Richard Saltoun Gallery is pleased to present Practices of Uncertainty, curated by the Iranian born, British painter, Samira Abbassy, who has lived and worked in New York City since 1998. This group show begins with the premise that the making of art always begins without guarantees.

As Abbassy notes:

Every artist develops methods, habits, rituals, and forms of knowledge, yet the act of making remains fundamentally uncertain. The studio is a place of experiment and excavation, where intention meets accident, where materials resist and propose, and where meaning often emerges through discovery rather than execution. To work as an artist is to cultivate a capacity for not knowing. 

Yet uncertainty is not merely a condition of artistic practice; it is also its discipline. The willingness to proceed without certainty, to follow an intuition whose destination remains unclear, requires a particular kind of faith. Not faith in a predetermined outcome, but faith in the process itself—in the belief that sustained attention, labor, and openness may reveal something previously unseen. In this sense, the artist's studio shares qualities with other spaces of contemplation and ritual. Like prayer or meditation, the act of making asks for both concentration and surrender: a trust that what emerges cannot be entirely controlled, anticipated, or possessed.

The installation brings together works by four established artists working in a diverse range of media.

John Dubrow’s distinctive paintings usually begin without any sketches or source material. In the absence of a plan, Dubrow lets the painting process shape the elusive painting image. As the paintings evolve, the artist continually mines the tension between the figurative image and abstraction, ultimately trying to find a third painting language.

Sara Rahbar’s work is born from what the artist describes as “fracture—of the body, of nationhood, of memory.” Cast bronze limbs, severed from their wholeness, take on the role of a communally collected relic exposing the normalization of violence in the human experience. As the artist notes, “these fragments embody survival in pieces.”

Anahita Vossoughi’s Exoskeleton series stems from the books she began reading with her young son, who had become fascinated with arthropods—or creatures possessing an exoskeleton. Examples such as the dynamic jewel beetle—which has an iridescent exoskeleton that scientists think may help her avoid predators due to her shifting, ever-changing color—became a metaphor the artist related to “having an inbuilt armor to protect you from the hostile world.”

Samira Abbassy’s intricately detailed figurative paintings and works on paper explore the human figure, animals, and scenes of war, drawing on a developed visual language that merges European and Iranian-Persian artistic traditions, Christian iconography, Persian and Indian miniature painting, Chinese painting and Qajar court painting. Deeply influenced by Jungian psychoanalysis and her matriarchal lineage, Abbassy’s practice navigates the intersection of the physical and metaphysical self, tracing connections between individual memory and collective history.

Notably, these four artists share little commonality of style, medium, or cultural background and the viewer is presented with painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration, and both interior and exterior worlds. Rather, what unites these artists, as Abbassy notes, is “the clarity of their individual visual languages and the conviction with which they pursue them. Each artist has developed a distinct vocabulary through sustained engagement with materials, form, memory, and perception. Their works offer not certainty of meaning, but certainty of inquiry. Through them, we encounter the unique prism through which each artist apprehends and reimagines the world... their works remind us that uncertainty is not the opposite of knowledge, conviction, or faith. It is often the ground from which they emerge.”