
The Simorgh over the Red Hills Oil on canvas · 55 × 60 cm £1,800 AE-P-0037
Paintings · series · 3 works

Paintings of the Simorgh, the great benevolent bird of Persian legend, descending over red hills, meeting a fish, filling a sky with feathers.
The Simorgh is the wise, enormous bird of Persian poetry, old enough to have seen the world destroyed three times, kind enough to raise a lost child as its own. Anahita has painted it again and again: sometimes as a blaze of feather and colour, sometimes as a presence above a landscape.
These are the most Persian of her paintings and also the freest. The colour is turned up, the composition is symbolic rather than observed, and the bird is always in motion.
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