Review: Haniko Zahra in "Thorns In Your Side" at House of CoHit

Haniko Zahra's explosive paintings depict scenes loaded with dreamlike symbolic content rendered with an aggressive and efficient conduct. Trained in Iran as a photorealistic commission-based portrait artist, Zahra's arrival to the United States has coincided with an eruption of innovation in form and content. She has left utility in the dust in search of vibrant supra-real transcendental art.

My first encounter with her work was frankly disorienting. There is a brash garishness to her color which throws the viewer's comfort aside. There is an overall warmth in her palette with deep yellows and burning oranges that contrasts against the other tones like a fever dream. The paintings are rendered with a sense of extraordinary pace, like Zahra flung the images from her mind onto the canvas in an instant of immediate impression. I'm reminded of my own scrawled dream journals, their crowded pages desperate to capture images that melt away under observation. 

Often Zahra works with themes of uneasy sexual encounters, but these are comparatively spare in this exhibition. In Magician, one magician suggestively pulls the white rabbit out of another unconscious magician's hat. In Crow, a balancing gymnast has her exposed breasts nursed on by crows. Otherwise there is not much one can say in this group of works about obvious sexual content, which is a development against Zahra's previous bodies of work. These works are overall more enigmatic and subtle in their images. This nuance in content benefits their longevity. When a viewer can too easily draw a meaning from a work, it suffers from a lack of complexity and withholds novelty on repeated viewings. I find this to be the case with Red Carpet, which depicted two dogs urinating on a Persian rug. With Zahra's biography in mind it is difficult to overcome the rather direct assertion of disrespect towards tradition, craft and her country of origin. Sympathy for this message is one thing, but from art it must be demanded that such a depiction go beyond didacticism. Perhaps it could be argued that elements of this work remain unexplainable and beg for additional interpretation but the core message is so overwhelming it leaves the work feeling narrowly straightforward. 

Otherwise Zahra's subjects have developed towards unknowable slippery narratives, leaving plenty of room for viewers to attach meaning in intuitive and individualized ways. This is the case with works like Coincidence, in which a lugubrious woman observes twin cats oddly poised in mirrored observation of the two twin towers of a playground structure in the background. Large calla lilies erotically extend their spadices like tongues at the left side of the picture. There are themes of anthropomorphism, motherhood, and duplication or mirroring that never quite announce their interrelation to the viewer. The picture maintains its enigmas, and it's these that pull the viewer into deeper curiosity, reflection, and contemplation. It is this complexity of emotional registers, the playful ambiguity towards content, the energy of her formal immediacy, and her willingness to lean into the grotesque which together form the magnetism of her works. 

Haniko Zahra, Magician, Oil On Canvas, 30”x40”, 2025

Haniko Zahra, Red Carpet, Oil on canvas, 30”x40”, 2024