Stepping into Leila Heller Gallery’s latest exhibition is like entering a labyrinth of memory itself. Stories in Thousand Pieces, the solo exhibition by Iranian-Egyptian artist and poet Parinaz Eleish Gharagozlou, unfolds as a mesmerizing tapestry of lived experience, where the boundaries between personal recollection and collective history blur seamlessly. On display until 14 January 2026, the show invites viewers to traverse both the vast and the intimate, offering a meditation on identity, memory, and the fleeting rhythms of everyday life.
From afar, Gharagozlou’s large-scale canvases present themselves as grand architectural visions, panoramic landscapes, or spatial compositions that command the eye. Yet as one approaches, these seemingly cohesive vistas dissolve into a constellation of countless fragments: newspaper clippings, textured paints, and minute objects, each holding its own narrative weight. Laughter, loss, hope, and quiet moments of reflection inhabit these fragments, creating a visual mosaic that captures the impermanence and intensity of human experience. The unframed edges of her works hint at stories that stretch beyond the canvas, suggesting that memory is never confined, it is expansive, mutable, and collective.
[Parinaz Eleish Gharagozlou, The Modern Metropolis, 2022. Mixed media and collage on canvas. 73.5 x 61 in]
Gharagozlou’s genius lies in her ability to balance the tension between detail and totality. She constructs layered realities in which the personal is inseparable from the collective, and where the passage of time itself is both observed and manipulated through the recurring use of found materials and newspapers. These elements serve as witnesses to history, yet they also reveal the mutability of narrative, echoing the shifting nature of memory and experience.
Born in Tehran to an Iranian mother and Egyptian father, Gharagozlou’s life journey, from Switzerland to the United States, echoes the transnational, multifaceted nature of her work. With MFAs in film production and English writing and poetry, her practice spans painting, film, literature, jewelry design, and faux-finish art, all of which converge in these mixed-media canvases to produce works that are as intellectually rich as they are visually stunning.
[Parinaz Eleish Gharagozlou, Stories in Thousand Pieces (installation view). Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai, 2025-2026. Courtesy of the gallery.]
In Stories in Thousand Pieces, every fragment carries meaning, yet the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. Gharagozlou asks her audience to linger, to examine, and to reflect, revealing the delicate interplay between the scattered moments of our lives and the overarching narratives they compose. The exhibition is both a visual and emotional symphony, a reminder that even in fragmentation, there is coherence; even in isolation, there is connection.
Ultimately, Gharagozlou’s work resonates as a meditation on resilience, memory, and the shared pulse of human existence. Stories in Thousand Pieces is a testament to the artist’s ability to transform the ephemeral and the fractured into something enduringly profound, a gallery of life’s fragments woven into a unified, vibrant whole.