The traditional carpet carries centuries of history — patterns passed down through generations, stories woven into geometry, colours tied to place and memory. And yet, what interests us now is how a new group of artists approaches this form with quiet curiosity. They are not trying to modernise carpets for the sake of it. Instead, they are listening to what the carpet already knows: structure, repetition, symbolism, labour.

Some of them paint rugs, some deconstruct them, some collaborate with weavers, and some transform the carpet into a sculptural or conceptual surface. Each of them steps into this tradition from a different angle, but the result is the same — the carpet stops being a decorative object and becomes a living language, open to reinterpretation.

Look at how Samira Alikhanzadeh, the Iranian artist, brings actual Persian carpets into her work — especially in her Persian Carpet series and the later Mirror Garden pieces, where she layers vintage rugs with printed photographs and mirrored surfaces.

The compelling part is that none of this reads as ornament. The carpet functions as an anchor — a cultural body — carrying the weight of memory, identity, and domestic history as she builds her compositions.

Using an actual rug this way creates a kind of hushed intimacy. Coupled with archival images, it becomes a terrain where private histories and shared narratives gently overlap.

Pour was born in England to a British mother and an Iranian father, and he grew up around carpets — his father ran a rug shop — so that familiarity isn’t theoretical, it is lived. You can feel it in the way he approaches pattern and repetition. He doesn’t imitate a single tradition; instead, he moves through Persian, Indian, East Asian, and sometimes hybrid designs, sampling across histories the way DJs sample sound.

The “carpet paintings” that first made him well-known use a multilayered process: silkscreening an initial pattern onto canvas, sanding parts of it down, repainting sections by hand, and letting the texture accumulate. The result isn’t a literal rug. It is more like a memory of one — a surface that carries traces of labour, wear, and re-presentation.

Maktabi is a different case entirely. Iwan Maktabi is a third-generation carpet house, but what makes it interesting today is how naturally it moves between heritage and contemporary design. The family’s history with rugs goes back to the 1920s, yet the gallery — founded in Beirut in the mid-90s — doesn’t just preserve tradition; it actively reshapes it.

Through Iwan Maktabi Lab, they collaborate with artists and designers to rethink what a carpet can be. Some projects lean into experimental materials, others reinterpret classic weaving techniques, but the common thread is this idea that a rug isn’t just a domestic object — it is a cultural surface, a place where history and innovation can sit side by side.

And one of our favourite collaborations is Hypercode by Roberto Sironi. It is a perfect example of what happens when you give a designer room to explore the carpet as a conceptual object rather than a decorative one. Sironi strips away traditional ornament and replaces it with a kind of visual language — abstract marks and coded gestures that read more like inscriptions than patterns. The rugs feel contemporary, but not in the “minimalist white cube” sense; they are grounded, textured, quietly charged with intention.

Jason Seife is one of the most meticulous artists working with carpet imagery today. His paintings draw directly from traditional Syrian and Persian rug patterns — but he reinterprets them through incredibly detailed hand-painting, pointillist gradients, and a colour logic that moves away from tradition while still honouring it.

Some pieces are literal re-drawings of historic carpets, down to the border structures and medallion layouts. Others dissolve into something more imagistic — where the rug framework is still there, but the palette or the rhythm feels more personal.

Between 2017 and 2019, Jason travelled through Istanbul, Morocco, Iran, and Syria, spending time with actual carpet weavers to understand how these traditions are held. He met artisans who wove from memory and others who followed meticulous carpet maps; he watched the difference between tribal, unmapped weaving — loose, irregular, deeply human — and the precision of mapped designs where every knot is pre-counted. He noticed how natural dyes restrict and guide the palette, how limitations become part of the creativity, and how centuries-old rules quietly determine the rhythm of a pattern.

And you can see that experience in his work. Jason simply knows the system of the carpet. The patterns he paints don’t feel copied; they feel understood.

Ali Cha𧪺n is a Lebanese artist born and raised in Kuwait, and you can feel that layered identity in the way he works with carpets. He drapes them over plastic monobloc chairs (Grandpa’s Monobloc, 2023), wraps them around oversized water jugs, and even turns them into paper aeroplanes (12 PM Class, 2019) — gestures that sit somewhere between nostalgia and critique.

Cha’aban often talks about the sense of being “a stranger everywhere,” a feeling familiar to many in the Arab diaspora, and his work transforms that tension into visual form. The carpet becomes a way to think about home — not as a fixed place, but as something portable, fragile, and constantly renegotiated.

His recent series, WE MUST BRIDGE THIS DIVIDE, pushes this even further, treating the rug as both metaphor and mediator: a soft surface trying to hold together a world that often feels split apart.