Tasha Amini (B. 1970)

‘I like the idea of figuring out how little you can put on a painting to make a painting,’ says Tasha Amini. ‘I love painting hair … there’s an intensity in the repetitive action and I can lose myself in doing it.’ Zoomed to close proximity, the hair in Untitled transforms to a surface suggestive of landscape or sea, undulant strokes of grey and black verging on abstraction. A dual exercise in intimacy and expansiveness, the work has a compelling psychological resonance. As in many of Amini’s paintings, we are presented not with a mere objective physical depiction, but an image heightened with emotional inflection through the most subtle and economical of means: this is not just an illustration of hair, but a meditation on how it feels to be close to someone.