Naples modernist Mally Khorasantchi is featured in this year’s "Florida Contemporary" art exhibit at The Baker Museum.
Each of her compositions in "Florida Contemporary" is a highly personal reaction to something that happened during Khorasantchi’s life. That’s particularly true of the artist’s four-panel oil-on-paper collage, “Rhapsodie in Blue.”
“A couple years ago, Mally had the opportunity to attend a concert at the Philharmonic where they played two versions of ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’” Baker Museum Chief Curator Courtney McNeil explained. “She was so moved by that experience that she went home and immediately started working on [a] work of art inspired by Gershwin and his music. It's amazing that it kind of came full circle from an exhibition and performance, and the performance led to visual art, and now the visual art is on view in this musical space.”
McNeil is referring to a Masterworks performance in 2024 that commemorated the 100th anniversary of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Seamlessly blending classical and jazz, the piece forever left its mark on the world of music. It left its mark on Khorasantchi as well.
“Both parts totally took me immediately. I'm usually not painting music, but this took my breath away,” Khorasantchi said.
Just as Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” is a symphonic conversation between various sections of the orchestra narrated by the piano, Khorasantchi’s "Rhapsodie in Blue” is a discourse involving plant material found in the “jungle” behind her house moderated by hexagons and honeycombs inspired by anthroposophy founder Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophy aims to bridge the divide between science and spirituality.
The collage evokes a visceral response from those who see it – such as the Naples Philharmonic’s music director.
“Alexander Shelley said he came into the room and got goosebumps,” Khorasantchi said. “He said, there's something about it.”
"Florida Contemporary" is on display in Hayes Hall at Artis-Naples through June 28.
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Artist Mally Khorasantchi was born in Germany and has lived and worked in Southwest Florida since 1992. From mangrove roots to honeycombs to palm fronds, her large-scale collage-based paintings are frequently inspired by the region’s flora and fauna. These organic forms appear through colorful, loosely painted brushstrokes that convey a sense of wonder at the majesty of nature. The painted strokes are interwoven with collaged elements drawn from a variety of sources, including the artist’s own photographs, family albums, telegrams from her late husband and anonymous magazine images. By combining these elements so densely, Khorasantchi is intentionally overloading her work with information in order to mimic the processes of memory and recollection.
Thematically, Khorasantchi’s works explore the contrasts found in humankind and in nature: beauty and discord, reality and falsehood, or representation and abstraction.
Works such as “Coming Home 4” (2024) and “Immigration” (2025) reflect the complexities of the artist’s own life experience. She is both a proud United States citizen and a German immigrant whose childhood was spent in Düsseldorf in the aftermath of World War II.
Her art is also shaped by wide-ranging cultural influences, such as the music of George Gershwin, which inspired the monumental quadriptych (four-part painting) “Rhapsodie in Blue” (2024).
Khorasantschi loves to attend concerts at Artis-Naples.
“Ballet, the master class concerts and then the lighter music like the pops,” she said sitting on the lanai of her home in Bonita Springs.
When she returned home from the “Rhapsody in Blue” Masterworks performance, she was inspired to convert her experiences into a visual artwork.
“But I had no canvas,” Khorasantchi noted. “Usually, my preference is always canvas. I had no canvas, but I always have paper, big heavy paper.”
The plant material depicted in the resulting collage came from the plant life found behind her Bonita Springs home, which abuts the eastern branch of the meandering Estero River. She took photographs that she printed on archival paper.
“Which makes the color a deeper blue,” she explained. “It's a king’s [or royal] blue. Then I got the idea to take other photos and have them printed in monochromatic grayish greenish, with each color totally chosen at the computer.”
The contrast infused her composition with movement that evokes the movements in the Gershwin piece.
“It's a long process to make sure that the composition comes across,” said Khorasantchi. “After all, it still has to be a composition that holds this whole thing together.”
Enter Rudolf Steiner’s hexagons
“I have been studying Rudolf Steiner for years, at least 12, 15 years,” Khorasantchi related. “I read all his books. He was an anthroposophist.”
Taken from the Greek for human (anthropos) and wisdom (sophia), anthroposophy centers on the idea that a spiritual world exists that is perceivable to humanity through enhanced consciousness and independent thought. According to Steiner, people have strayed farther and farther away from accessing this world, but they can relearn how to do so again, which would lead to individual and universal well-being and advancement.
Over the years, Steiner and his followers applied his ideas to architecture, dance, medicine (in the form of alternative healing practices), political theory, banking and biodynamic agriculture, an early form of organic agriculture that involves a mystical approach. He was best known for influencing education in the form of Waldorf schools, which emphasize a non-traditional creative curriculum over standard subjects like literacy and math.
Steiner viewed bees as "sun creatures" that bring cosmic wisdom to Earth and serve as spiritual role models for humanity. In a series of eight lectures he gave in 1923, Steiner linked the hexagon shape of honeycomb to the six-sided crystalline structure of quartz and the "six-sided force" within human bone. Steiner predicted the decline of bees due to industrialization and advised that their health depends on spiritual, not just physical, care.
“He starts with the bees and the shape of the hexagon, which repeats itself everywhere in nature,” Khorasantchi observed. “It starts in a bubble. It's everywhere you look under a microscope. It's always the shape of a hexagon. Even Florida limestone is in the shape of the hexagon. So it’s the sign that I'm using for life, for the beginning and the utmost feature of everything that we see around us.”
Khorasantchi also uses it when she paints to create balance in compositions such as “Rhapsodie in Blue.”
“Sometimes if you have too much this way, you have to have something, some kind of a structure. That's how I use it.”
About the artist
Born soon after the end of World War II (in 1948) in Dusseldorf, Germany, Mally (Breuer) Khorasantchi discovered her passion for artmaking as a young child.
Khorasantchi studied with several noted professional German artists who nurtured her artistic development. By the 1990s, she had two solo exhibitions of her work in Dusseldorf.
Khorasantchi immigrated to the United States in 1992, established permanent residency in 2001 and became an American citizen in 2006. She has maintained a full-time studio practice as a painter in Southwest Florida for the past 20 years.
Her work has been featured in 24 solo exhibitions throughout Florida, New York City and Germany, as well as 20 group exhibitions, including the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. In addition to corporate and private collectors both in the United States and abroad, her paintings are in the permanent museum collections of The Baker Museum; The Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida; Freuenmuseum, Bonn, Germany; the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; Osthaus Museum, Hafen, Germany; and Florida Gulf Coast University, Estero.
She is represented by the Harmon-Meek Gallery, Naples, and the Walter Wickiser Gallery, New York.
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Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
