The Last Moment: Reinterpretation of a Death

“The Last Moment: Reinterpretation of a Death”

This exhibition comprises twelve paintings that focus on a single instant: the last moment before the decisive act—a suspended time in which the female body and its surrounding space are halted on the threshold of decision. Five works in the series are shaped through an appropriative approach, with a conscious fidelity to historical representations of the death of Lucretia, particularly those by Ludovico Mazzanti, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Johann Michael Rottmayr. This fidelity is not a mere reconstruction, but a direct confrontation with an image fixed within the history of art.

Alongside these works, other paintings shift the narrative into contemporary, private spaces—rooms that appear safe yet become sites of suspension. The instrument of violence is sometimes present and sometimes absent, but the tension of the moment persists in the posture of the body and the silence of the space.

What is presented in this series is not death itself, but the time before it: a pause between past and present, between the historical image and the contemporary body.

Sarah Pouyanfard