Under the Armor
Artist : Yasaman Farmanara
Presented by: Studio 37
Los Angeles, October 2026
PRESS RELEASE
By Tina Barouti
Studio 37 is proud to present Under the Armor, the first solo exhibition from Los Angeles-based artist Yasaman Farmanara. The show opens with a collector’s preview on Thursday, October 15th, 2026, followed by a public reception on Saturday, October 17 and an intimate afternoon of tea and coffee with the artist on Sunday, October 18. Under the Armor will remain on view by appointment only. Deeply rooted in the study of anatomy and live-model observation, Yasaman works fluidly across drawing, sculpture, and painting. Under the Armor brings together an ambitious body of new work: four bronze sculptures, nine paintings in acrylic and oil, and twelve drawings spanning charcoal, graphite, oil stick, and watercolor.
Before turning to fine art, Yasaman built a long and successful career in fashion and textiles, where she helped dress the human body. In this series, she inverts that instinct entirely. Rather than clothing the figure, she strips it bare. The nude body becomes an instrument for examining the vulnerability that lives within all of us. In works like Enough (2025) and Anatomy of Ache (2025), hands are rendered with great detail and care, often becoming the focal point of the composition. In this new body of work, the hands serve as a motif with a language of their own that speaks to the tension between holding and releasing emotions.
That tension is on full display in The Weight of Hope (2026), where two bodies twist together so closely that it becomes difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. One figure closes her eyes, her head sinking into her palm, her other hand pressed to her chest, marking a moment of exhaustion. Beside her, a second figure tilts upward toward the light, as if kicking toward the surface of deep water. One appears defeated; the other, as the painting's title promises, is reaching for hope. Through restless brushwork, saturated color, and a tangled choreography of limbs, Yasaman turns raw emotion into physical form.
The bronze sculpture Ruminating (2025) pushes that vocabulary into three dimensions. An emaciated figure curls inward, arms resting on her knees, spine and ribs pressing visibly against skin, her face is hidden beneath a curtain of short hair. For Yasaman, the grieving and exhausted figure’s protruding spine represents the backbone of strength. Yasaman, by her own account, keeps her emotions closely guarded. But in her sculptures, paintings, and drawings, she allows for that restraint to give way. What emerges is a body of work that holds fragility and strength in the same breath. Here, the armor is removed, revealing something more honest underneath.
Yasaman Farmanara (b. 1968) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in drawing, sculpture, and painting. Yasaman pursued studies in fashion design, with a thirty-year career in textile and fashion. She has participated in group shows at Tag Gallery (2026, 2025), Covet Art Gallery (2025), Gallerium Art (2025), Biafarin (2025), Art Share Los Angeles (2025), Aristocratix (2024), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2023), and Miracle Mile Medical Group (2023).