Tina Dion’s debut solo exhibition, Behind Cypress Forests, opened on March 13, 2026, at the T293 gallery in Rome and will remain on display until April 17, 2026. This exhibition marks the culmination of her artistic exploration, weaving together personal memory with collective history, examining themes of body and identity, and exploring emotional suspension and tension.
From Corporate to Canvas: The Birth of a Creative Expression
Tina Dion Mehrpouy (b. 1992), an Iranian-American artist, grew up between Iran and the United States and is currently based in New York City. Her journey into painting began around 2020, during a hiatus from her corporate entertainment career, where she had worked as an associate producer for the Netflix animated series Spy Kids: Mission Critical. Painting emerged not as a planned career move but as an essential form of expression – an alternative avenue to delve into her innermost self and emotions. Although she attended courses at the Academy of Art in New York, Dion primarily credits her self-taught approach as crucial to shaping her unique artistic vision and creative independence.
Dion’s artworks are situated within the dynamic realm of contemporary figurative painting, where identity, cultural memory, and the human body form the central pillars of her layered exploration. Primarily executed in oil on canvas, her figures emerge from minimalist or ethereal spaces, with backgrounds often reduced to color fields or undefined areas. The figure commands attention as the focal point, imbued with theatrical presence and simultaneous symbolic and psychological depth. Color and technique seamlessly merge; contrasting or intensely saturated tones generate a compelling tension between realism and stylization, control and emotional openness.
Between Space and Symbolic Figuration
A recurring theme in Tina Dion’s oeuvre is female identity. Her focus on the female body is not abstract; it deeply resonates with the complexities of the Iranian diaspora and contemporary discussions surrounding women’s self-determination and visibility. Dion’s artistic practice navigates between memory and exile, visibility and erasure. Her figures often inhabit liminal thresholds, spaces where nothing is entirely settled, existing in a delicate balance between fragility and resilience.
Behind Cypress Forests: Memory as an Inner Space
The exhibition in Rome showcases the most mature phase of the artist’s exploration. Behind Cypress Forests originated from the concept of being profoundly shaped by a place and history not directly experienced, but intimately internalized. Dion engages with pre-revolutionary Iran, inhabiting a dimension where past and present remain in constant tension.
Her source material is archival: magazine covers, photographs of women from the Iranian royal family, and images from the 20th century. Dion does not merely reproduce these but translates them into paintings that oscillate between figuration and abstraction. Her subjects appear suspended, neither fully anchored in the present nor entirely absorbed by the past. Each artwork becomes an act of inhabiting memory, bringing together remembrance, desire, and loss in a dialogue between collective history and personal experience.
A central element in the series is the depiction of hair, rendered with extreme care. In Iran, women’s hair has long been subject to regulation; Dion transforms it into a vehicle of resistance, desire, and memory. In some works, faces are obscured by strips of adhesive tape, a material already employed in her painting process to remove excess color. This gesture simultaneously embodies rebellion and an intuitive artistic method: the face recedes while hair, skin, and clothing emerge with striking precision. The portrait thus transforms into an interior landscape, symbolizing the persistent reduction of women to visible objects devoid of voice.
The exhibition’s title, Behind Cypress Forests, evokes the cypress tree, a symbol of eternity, grace, and resilience in Iranian culture. Positioning oneself “behind” these forests signifies adopting a lateral perspective: viewing history and one’s origins from an internal exile without abandoning them. This oblique viewpoint becomes a poetic hallmark of her painting, intricately weaving together personal and collective memory without oversimplification.
Between Body, Painterly Gesture, and Suspended Time
Tina Dion maintains an implicit narrative dimension within her images. While not explicitly telling linear stories, her works evoke psychological and symbolic situations that invite viewer interpretation. The body functions as an emotional device: postures, gestures, and gazes suggest introspection, vulnerability, strength, and resistance, yet never confining themselves to a single, unequivocal reading.
Dion’s work is situated within the renewed interest in figurative painting over recent decades. Following a long period dominated by conceptual art and radical abstraction, many artists have rediscovered the narrative and symbolic power of the figure. Dion’s figuration is not nostalgic; rather, it is filtered through a contemporary sensibility – synthetic, enigmatic, and open to multiple interpretations.
A distinctive aspect of her practice is the interplay between technical control and emotional expression. The painterly gesture, often calibrated yet free from excessive constraints, allows the canvas to breathe and the viewer to access a dimension of suspended time. Each figure seems to exist in a liminal moment, where memory and desire coexist, and identity reveals itself as a complex, never-final construction.
A Painting in Balance Between History and Subjectivity
Tina Dion demonstrates how contemporary figurative painting can still profoundly explore identity and social themes. In Behind Cypress Forests, the female body as a political space, Iranian history as a suspended dimension, and the painterly gesture balanced between control and surrender, merge into artworks that invite viewers to pause, question symbols and ambiguities, and reflect on their own relationship with time, memory, and identity.
The exhibition encourages a contemplation that transcends mere aesthetic observation, transforming the gallery space into a site for introspection and inner dialogue. The paintings thus become bridges between worlds: the experienced and the imagined, individual experience and collective memory, personal history and cultural narrative.
Behind Cypress Forests is more than just an exhibition; it’s an immersive experience that confronts the viewer with the complexity of being and remembering, and with the possibility of inhabiting the thresholds between past and present, visible and hidden, body and memory.
