Fatemeh Burnes
Let the Whispers Rise
Goddess of Chaos, 2023, Oil, Handmade paper and spray paint on canvas, 72 x 96 inches
Peacock, 2023, Oil, pigment, handmade paper, and spray paint on canvas, 47 x 47 inches
Under My Skin, 2022, Oil, pigment, handmade paper, and piano rolls on canvas, 44 x 44 inches
Finding Home, 2021, Oil and handmade paper on canvas, 44 x 44 inches
Meeting the Rabbit, 2016 -18, Oil, handmade paper and pigment on wood panel, 144 x 72 inches
Fool's Paradise, 2018, Oil, asphalt, drywall and pigment on canvas, 60 x 60 inches
L.A. River, 2016, Oil Paint, Handmade Paper and Pigment on Wood Panel, 44 x 65 inches
Let's Grow a Garden on 5th, 2023, Oil, handmade paper, and carving on panel, 16 x 16 inches
My Backyard, 2020, Oil and pigment on panel, 16 x 16 inches
Hush Moss, 1028, Oil, pigment, emulsion and spray paint on wood panel, 16 x 16 inches
Chimera, 2018, Oil, pigment and spray primer on wood panel, 16 x 16 inches
Just a twist, Oil, pigment, handmade paper, and piano rolls on canvas 47 x 47 inches
Pique-nique Dans le Jardin, 2023, Oil and handmade paper on canvas, 47 x 47 inches
Fatemeh Burnes works between painting and photography to examine the traces of modern events, ecological crisis, social rupture, displacement, and inherited histories. Her paintings move through surreal, psychologically charged spaces where recognizable forms coexist with indeterminate ones.
In Let the Whispers Rise, Burnes layers, conceals, reveals, compresses, and displaces visual information. Her paintings function like visual poems in which contradictory forces remain active: order and chaos, reality and fantasy, nature and history, violence and lyricism. Rather than resolving these oppositions, Burnes allows them to circulate within the image, creating works that feel suspended between memory, dream, and warning.
Perhaps it’s time to let the whispers rise, to unfurl the silenced stories beneath common skies.
— Fatemeh Burnes
Words That Travel With Me
“I planted my hands in the garden,
I will grow, I know, I know, I know…”
— Forugh Farrokhzad
“Later that night
I held an atlas in my lap,
ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered:
where does it hurt?”
— Warsan Shire
“To be human
is to be a conversation.”
— Ocean Vuong
“Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time…
we do what prisoners do, and what the jobless do: we cultivate hope.”
— Mahmoud Darwish, from Under Siege
“The place where we are right is
hard and trampled,
but let the grass grow back.”
— Yehuda Amichai
These voices accompany my journey as an artist—voices that speak of growth, displacement, tenderness, resilience, and our shared humanity. They remind us that beyond borders, histories, and identities, we are connected through our capacity to listen, imagine, and cultivate hope.