Exhibition spotlight: Parham Ghalamdar’s A Fine Kettle of Fish at HOME

It’s very much a last-chance-to-see in our latest exhibition spotlight, with the show drawing to a close this weekend.

Manchester-based painter Parham Ghalamdar presents a new body of lockdown-era work which confronts the perpetual tension between existential opposites: chaos and order, presence and absence, life and death.  

Drawing on his time as a graffiti artist in Tehran, and the pandemic period spent recalibrating his artistic approach without a studio or gallery, Ghalamdar’s paintings show an unflinching and self-referential attempt to restore sense to the mayhem around him—the ‘kettle of fish’—with honest displays of its spiritual difficulty, as his works often spill beyond the canvas and onto the gallery wall itself.

As a specialist oil painter with a background in street art, Ghalamdar deploys a saccharine, acidic colour palette commonly associated with graffiti in his pieces. This stylistic choice, along with his other invigorating methods, is part of an attempt to vividly capture the emotion, movement and texture of subjects which represent the opportunity for rebirth and prosperity.