Farah Abolghasem

Born in 1960, Farah Abolghasem graduated with a degree in painting. She began her professional career in 1990 with an exhibition at Seyhoun Gallery. Since then, she has participated in more than one hundred solo and group exhibitions in Iran and internationally. Her works are held in the collections of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Imam Ali Religious Arts Museum, Pasargad Bank Museum, and Winsor & Newton Museum in London. She has also participated in five editions of the Tehran Auction.

Her early paintings were primarily figurative in expression. Gradually, her practice moved toward collage and mixed media, leading to increasingly abstract compositions in which figures became smaller and more incidental. Alongside painting, she explored various other disciplines, including the creation of contemporary silver jewelry incorporating stone, wood, and glass; sculpture; and experiments with paper pulp. She wrote articles and art criticism for art publications, turned to furniture design, and explored installation and assemblage. Yet painting remained at the heart of her artistic practice.

Following her abstract period, her work gradually returned to a figurative space, but with a significant shift: still-life objects and figures moved into the foreground, while abstraction receded into the background. In her still lifes, farah creates poetic spaces, expressing a range of emotions through color and form, including loss, loneliness, hope, a sense of belonging, and the quiet attachments of everyday life. She has built a simple life among objects, which become the actors on her stage and the words of her poetry.

Structure and balance are among her foremost concerns in her engagement with the canvas. For her, a painting reaches completion when it achieves structural coherence and aesthetic equilibrium. Her palette is limited, yet through this restrained range of colors, she expresses an unlimited spectrum of emotions.