Edwynn Houk Gallery presents Revelation, a new body of work by Vienna based artist Sissi Farassat, on view from 2 September through 18 October 2025.
In Revelation, Farassat reframes the past. Working from anonymous vintage photographs — often touched by the glamour of Hollywood’s Golden Era — she reveals only a carefully selected fragment of each image. The rest is concealed behind a precisely cut overmat, a process art historian Michel Poivert has described as anti-collage. He writes:
“For those familiar with Sissi Farassat’s work, Revelation is above all a surprise… The desired object reveals itself only through concealment… What we don’t see takes center stage. What is primarily addressed here is the off-screen as a space that is both real and imaginary.”
Where collage builds through accumulation, Farassat works by subtraction. What remains visible becomes charged with the tension of the unseen. The gesture resists the completeness of the found photograph, creating space for ambiguity, speculation, and invention.
Many of the source images are vernacular portraits of women, shaped both by the conventions of their historical moment and by the sitter’s own self-presentation. Farassat’s curated windows disrupt these conventions, setting aside the fiction of the whole portrait. In doing so, she transforms the hint of mystery present in each image into its defining feature. What remains suggests more than it reveals, each portrait becoming a meeting place between what we see and what we imagine.
Sissi Farassat was born in Tehran, Iran in 1969 and moved to Vienna in 1978.
She approaches photography as both image and object. Working with found and self‑made photographs, she transforms prints through meticulous, hands‑on methods, from intricate embroidery and beadwork to, in her most recent work, overmats cut into unexpected forms. Drawing from the visual language of vernacular photography, her work emphasizes the tension between what a photograph reveals and what it withholds, touching on themes of memory, desire, and the shifting role of women in visual culture.
Farassat’s early portraits and self‑portraits are densely encrusted with beads and sequins, each stitch reframing the subject through the gradual accumulation of surface. In her recent Revelation series, much of the image is concealed behind these overmats so that only select fragments remain visible, a method art historian Michel Poivert has described as anti‑collage. This distillation reduces the photograph to its most charged elements, allowing the mystery to become the image itself.
Her work has been exhibited widely in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, and is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna; Fotomuseum Winterthur; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Sissi Farassat : Revelation
September 2 – October 18, 2025
Edwynn Houk Gallery
693 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10022
www.houkgallery.com
Opening reception with the artist:
Thursday, September 18, 5-7pm
Edwynn Houk Gallery is also present at The Armory Show 2025 in New York City at the Javits Center from September 4 to 7, 2025.
Booth 223
www.thearmoryshow.com
