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Hasti Alhouei - Resilience @ Hugomento Gallery


  • Hugomento Gallery 795 22nd Street San Francisco, CA, 94107 United States (map)

Hasti Alhouei is an Iranian-American artist and designer whose practice explores themes of identity, feminine power, and consciousness through abstract painting and typography. Based in the Sierra Foothills of California, her work emerges from the intersection of Eastern philosophy, depth psychology, and the embodied knowledge of cultural displacement and transformation.

Born and raised in Tehran, Alhouei’s early years were marked by resistance to societal constraints that sought to suppress artistic expression and feminine identity. This formative experience has shaped her current practice, which reclaims space for the feminine voice through repetitive forms and organic materials.

Alhouei’s abstract compositions employ conscious repetition as both method and metaphor—each iteration revealing the impermanence and transformation inherent in all phenomena. The recurring forms in her work transcend mere representation, investigating instead the ontological presence and cultural significance of feminine existence.

Central to Alhouei’s practice is an unwavering commitment to creative freedom. She navigates freely across stylistic territories, allowing her expressions to evolve as her inner landscape shifts. This fluidity honors the primacy of authentic expression—prioritizing the truth of her internal experience and cultivating a profound dialogue between her inner world and her audience. Her work becomes a bridge for intimate connection, where personal revelation meets collective resonance.

Drawing from over two decades of meditation practice, Alhouei approaches art-making as contemplative inquiry. Her process-driven methodology privileges presence over outcome, allowing forms to emerge through sustained attention and embodied awareness. This approach yields works that oscillate between control and surrender, structure and fluidity, presence and absence.

Alhouei’s work has been informed by her teaching experience in design and her ongoing exploration of the relationship between consciousness, creativity, and social transformation. Her pieces invite viewers into a space of contemplation, where the boundaries between inner and outer experience become permeable.

Throughout the ages, women have donned grace as armor, their beauty a quiet insurrection against the weight of the world. They have been shattered like light through prisms—yet from each fracture revealed not defeat, but spectrum after spectrum of resilience.

Beneath centuries of erasure, they harbored an unquenchable flame. With minds that carved rivers through stone and hearts that held civilizations whole, they ascended to heights the world insisted they could never reach. In them, resilience reveals its truest nature—not merely enduring or recovering, but transforming suffering into something generative, finding ways to flourish even in hostile conditions.

Women have always understood that being broken is not the opposite of being whole—it is sometimes the beginning of a different kind of wholeness, one that includes and transcends breakage. They who have been asked to bend without breaking, to hold without being held, to create life from their own bodies while being denied sovereignty over them—they know that resilience is not passive endurance but active alchemy.

Through this ancient knowing, they discovered themselves to be both more fragile and more powerful than imagined. Yesterday, today, tomorrow—they remain the architects of time, threading futures through the needle of now. Sacred guardians who cradle the horizon, who seed hope in scorched earth.

This exhibited painting series honors that eternal fire—the force that teaches mountains to stand, the wisdom that transforms every wound into a window. It celebrates the power by which women turn breaking into becoming, silence into anthem, survival into art.

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Continuum: MoAD Over Time @ MoAD

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(Re)Constructing History @ SFMOMA