In Through the Hourglass, Arghavan Khosravi reimagines the female form at the center of Dalí’s The God of the Bay of Roses through her own lens. Where Dalí’s figure is monumental, nude, and pedestal-bound, Khosravi’s are clothed, doubled, and introspective, turning the outward gaze inward.

Maintaining Dalí’s sense of theatrical scale, Khosravi replaces his surreal landscape with the layered language of Persian miniature painting. The hexagonal structure is not merely a frame but a vessel, at once architectural and psychological, that both contains and constrains the figures within it. The ornamental latticework evokes systems of power, religious and patriarchal, that shape and restrict women’s lives.

An hourglass void sits at the heart of the composition, echoing the hollow form in Gala’s torso from Dalí’s original, yet here it becomes a portal. Within it, a turbulent sea softens into a still lake, a passage from chaos to calm, from exterior spectacle to interior world. Drawing on the “stacked perspective” of miniature painting, Khosravi collapses multiple realities into a single surface: the sea transforming into a lake, the figures split and doubled, and the voids acting as thresholds rather than absences.

By merging Surrealism’s dream logic with her own cultural history, Khosravi creates a meditation on duality and transformation, exploring containment and release, silence and self-reflection, and the boundaries that hold and the thresholds that liberate.