As we approach the country’s 250th anniversary, immigration is top of mind for many people – including Naples artist Mally Khorasantchi.
Her large abstract compositions are a personal reaction to something that’s happened to her. This includes her painting “Immigration.” The four-panel piece is on view in the "Florida Contemporary" exhibition at the Baker Museum in Naples.
“I painted that specifically for the show because it's about 250 years America,” said Khorasantchi.
Khorasantchi and her late husband immigrated to the United States from Germany. They had a seasoned immigration lawyer. They still found the process difficult, often contentious.
“He said, you go by the rules, you stay in this country. You don't go by the rules, you leave this country. It's not smooth and it's not sweet. It's hard. It's really hard.”
Her painting is a metaphorical representation of how she sees the process.
“You have a mixture of plants that don't really fit together. That's what I think America stands for,” she said.
Khorasantchi likens immigrants who don’t follow the rules to melaleuca trees, which disrupt local ecosystems and require drastic mechanical measures to remove. Immigrants who follow the rules, says Khorasantchi, are royal poincianas.
“When you really want to make it, that's when you bloom. This country is always blooming,” she added.
“Immigration” is on view at the Baker Museum through June 28.
More about Khorasantchi’s immigration story
Khorasantchi’s immigration story began when her son, Mark, lost his best friend to meningitis at the age of 14. Rather than return to school without his childhood buddy, Mark convinced his parents to let him continue his education in the United States as an exchange student.
Mark ultimately returned to Germany to finish high school, but soon after he returned to the United States and eventually enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania.
Khorasantchi and her husband visited Mark there. It was November and the weather in Philadelphia was cold and dreary, much like it is in Dusseldorf at that time of year. So they contacted their travel agent, who booked a room at South Seas Plantation on Captiva Island.
“I woke up in the middle of the night and my husband was not in bed,” Khorasantchi recounted. “He was sitting in this screened-in lanai. He looked up and said, ‘Listen to these noises,’ and we both fell in love with the nature here. We both fell totally in love.”
On a bad weather day, they visited Bay Colony, where they put a deposit on a house. One year later, they moved there and began the immigration process. [Coincidentally, their Bay Colony neighbor was Mrs. Sandy Figge, who gifted Artis-Naples the funds for the Chihuly “Red Chandelier” that hangs in the gallery in which Khorasantchi’s Florida Contemporary collages are on display.]
Khorasantchi’s immigration attorney advised them that their best avenue toward eventual citizenship was to establish an international company. Her husband already had a business in Germany. So she opened a cosmetic shop at Coastland Mall.
“I started with two girls,” Khorasantchi noted. “I had no clue about cosmetics. No clue at all. I ended up with two shops and 18 girls. It was the best awakening for myself as a leisurely living la-la-la painter. Everything was always beautiful around me, but here I was suddenly responsible for single women that had babies or whatever. They had to have a paycheck and we had to make money and we had to be successful. That's what makes me a proud American. It was not easy. I have no regret at all.”
It also explains why she insists that people immigrating to the United States also observe the rules and has little patience for those who do not.
“I've had friends here that were deported under Obama and that was not sweet,” she added. “But if you do not do the right things, then you have to accept eventually that you will be asked to leave or else it ends up in chaos. That's my feeling about it. I'm proud to be an immigrant, and I've never had a problem with other people not liking me for that.”
About the artist
From mangrove roots to honeycombs to palm fronds, Mally Khorasantchi’s 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 densely combining these elements, Khorasantchi intentionally overloads 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, 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). [For more, read/hear “Mally Khorasantchi collage in Florida Contemporary exhibition inspired by 100th anniversary of Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue'.”]
“Actually, I’m always painting the zeitgeist,” said Khorasantchi. “So there was a time [in 2017] when I noticed there’s too much information, and then again, no information. And even when there’s too much information, it's not really focusing on the things that you really want to know.”
This quandary culminated in a composition she titled “Faked News,” with the white, unpainted spaces signifying those times when there’s no information at all about a given topic or subject.
The painting is semi-autobiographical, with a few photographs of the artist collaged into the composition. Khorasantchi calls it a “pictorial memoir.”
“It's not just by coincidence,” Khorasantchi explained. “I'm about 40 years old [in the one photograph]. I'm sitting on a balcony on the island of Capri, looking over at Naples, Italy, where Mount Vesuvius is. There was already this thought inside of me to move to America. My son was an exchange student in America. So on the other side is a collage of the Statue of Liberty. And ironically, I ended up moving to Naples, Florida."
The painting contains a number of other familial references. For example, there’s a collage photo of a pond filled with numerous turtles that’s a loving homage to her stepdaughter, Tanya.
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.
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.
Sponsored in part by the State of Florida through the Division of Arts and Culture.
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