PORTLAND, ME.- Moss Galleries presents Samira Abbassy: Dialogical Narratives, a solo exhibition on view through August 30 at Moss Galleries Portland. Featuring a powerful selection of paintings and works on paper, the exhibition showcases the internationally acclaimed Iranian-born artist Samira Abbassy, whose work explores themes of cultural displacement, fragmented identity, and the transformational power of storytelling.

Drawing from Islamic miniatures, Sufi cosmologies, and her personal diasporic experiences in the UK and New York, Abbassy constructs a unique visual language that bridges figuration, allegory, and symbolic fragmentation. Her luminous, archetypal figures become vessels for historical, psychological, and ancestral voices, layered in a cosmology where multiple truths coexist.

“Abbassy’s work invites deep reflection on what it means to inhabit multiple identities,” said Elizabeth Moss, founder and director of Moss Galleries. “Her paintings speak to both personal and universal experiences of migration, memory, and transformation. It’s a rare opportunity to witness an artist who makes the invisible visible.”

The exhibition’s title, Dialogical Narratives, speaks to the polyphonic nature of Abbassy’s work—where truth is not singular, but emergent from overlapping histories and voices. Rather than offering linear narratives, her compositions dwell in the in-between: the space between self and other, East and West, memory and myth. These are portraits of becoming, where identity is not fixed but in flux.

“The work is an inquiry into how to reveal the figure as a psycho/emotional being,” Abbassy explains, “encountering its various internal states: the violence, ecstasy, and epiphany within.”

Over a career spanning more than three decades, Abbassy has exhibited widely, with her work included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. She was born in Ahwaz, Iran, raised in London, and has lived in New York since 1998, where she helped establish the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and its Studio Center.

Her work has been recognized with numerous fellowships and awards, including honors from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2019, her work was featured in the 26th Venice Biennale presented by Heist Gallery, London.

Samira Abbassy: Dialogical Narratives is currently on view at Moss Galleries in Portland, Maine, through August 30. For more information, visit www.elizabethmossgalleries.com.