Asma Kian

Paintings about what a face does under pressure.

A tall blue and brown canvas in which a face is drawn over itself several times. Four eyes look out from different heights, tied together by pale ribbons that loop down through the whole head. — Four Ways of Seeing2025 · Oil on canvas

Work from 2022 to 2026

A dancer in a pale blue tutu at the top of a lift, both arms open and head tipped back. The skirt breaks into brushstrokes of turquoise and cream that carry on into the background. — Adagio2023 · Oil on canvas

A woman lying asleep inside a large open scallop shell on a shore at dusk, dark hair loose, a length of pale cloth across her legs. The sea is behind her on the left. — Venus, Resting2022 · Oil on canvas

A grey face with closed eyes floating on bare paper. The jaw thins into two long black drips that run to the bottom of the sheet. — Dissolve2025 · Ink and acrylic on paper

An open red mouth seen close up, teeth apart, holding a live goldfish inside a bubble of water. The ground behind is loose coral, pink and pale blue. — Held Breath2026 · Oil on canvas

A square canvas of soft overlapping fields: ochre and gold across the top, deep pink and violet down the right, pale blue and white through the lower left, with two translucent squares laid over the middle where the colours mix. — Interference2026 · Oil on canvas

A rider on a bucking brown horse, painted in full colour, surrounded by flat cobalt blue outlines of four other riders being thrown in every direction. — Eight Seconds2026 · Oil and acrylic on canvas

A black bull with a blue sheen standing side on against a flat red ground, head turned toward the viewer, white socks above black hooves. — Bull, Red Ground2026 · Acrylic on canvas

Seven horses walking in a line across pale sand, in white, grey, chestnut and black. Behind them a flat green band, and above that the Dubai skyline under heavy grey cloud. — Seven, Leaving2025 · Oil on canvas

A tumbler of whisky over ice with a cigar resting across the rim, lit from behind so the glass glows amber against a smoky red and black ground. — Nightcap2024 · Oil on canvas

A bald head and shoulders against a hot magenta ground. The left half of the face is bruised violet and the right half is scraped to bare white, with the features dragged away by the knife. — Half Light2026 · Oil on canvas

Two Weathers2026 · Acrylic on canvas

A deep blue canvas carrying a block of pale vertical marks in even rows, like a count kept by hand. No two marks are quite the same, so the grid breathes instead of repeating. — Tally2026 · Acrylic on canvas

A head and shoulders filling the canvas edge to edge, cut out of cobalt blue and bare cream in wide knife strokes. The face is left almost empty, so the blue around it does the describing. — Sitter in Blue2026 · Oil on canvas

See every painting

Statement

I paint faces, mostly. Some of them hold together and some of them do not.

The work runs in two directions at once. On one side there is slow painting, worked thin and layered, where the figure stays whole and the light does the talking. On the other side the paint goes on fast with a knife, and the face splits, drips, or gets interrupted by something with no business being there. A goldfish. A second pair of eyes.

What I am after sits between those two. It is the moment a person stops performing composure and has not yet decided what to do instead. Painting is slow enough to catch it and stubborn enough to keep it once it is down.

Read the full statement

In a room

Every painting has a page of its own.

A canvas is a physical thing before it is an image of one, and its size only reads once there is a ceiling above it and furniture beneath it. Each page shows the work in full and a room view beside it, to give a sense of that.

A room view: Four Ways of Seeing on a wall above a bench, with the ceiling and the floor in frame.

Start with Four Ways of Seeing