Across Iran’s contemporary art scene, a quiet but persistent rhythm runs through the work of certain painters — artists who turn to nature as mirror, memory, and language. In their work, nature becomes a space of introspection, a way to think about time, disappearance, and what it means to belong to a place that is constantly transforming.

Some of these paintings feel as if time has stopped. Others show landscapes left behind, speaking softly about loss. There are works that burst with light, and others that stay close to the real. They are all different, yet bound by the same thread: a deep, unhurried devotion to nature.

Born in Tehran in 1976, Arezoo Shahdadi’s drawings carry a kind of whisper. Her lines are fine and deliberate — thin branches, shadows, fragments of memory. The nature she depicts often feels abandoned, caught between presence and disappearance, whether she works in colour or monochrome.

Her compositions are meditations on absence and loss, where the white of the paper becomes as expressive as the drawn mark. In The Breach, Arezoo reflects on how loss reshapes perception. When someone dear is gone, a familiar light fades, a place becomes unreachable. What remains is the quiet trace of their presence — a breath caught in the air, a shadow that lingers. Look, the work is monochrome, almost weightless; the air within it seems to have stilled, as if nature itself has dimmed for a moment. Shahdadi turns this invisible shift into form, capturing the way absence seeps into memory and subtly alters the fabric of life.

Lately, colour has started to return to her world. Look closely at these artworks: the landscapes she paints now are vivid, saturated, yet still somehow deserted. Even in brightness, there is a sense of stillness, as if life has momentarily stepped aside, leaving only its trace.

Meghdad Lorpour, born in Shiraz in 1983, approaches nature as both document and myth. Trained as a painter, he has spent years mapping the connections between land, animal, and story. His recent paintings shift away from human figures toward landscapes that breathe on their own — windswept, luminous, slightly haunted.

In his series Nashi Wind, the invisible becomes tangible: gusts of air carve out valleys, colours seem eroded by movement, and silence has weight. Lorpour’s works are the result of long research, sketches, and travels, yet they never feel documentary. Instead, they read as meditations — how wind, water, and dust carry our histories long after we have left.

Maryam Beigi's work moves between landscape, memory, and perception. Look at this piece from An Opening into Colour: a Stream Dreams exhibition — it is shockingly vibrant. Every line feels alive, as if the forest itself were burning with light, caught somewhere between dream and reality.

In Maryam’s paintings, nature is never static. It breathes, trembles, and glows from within. Her forests are not places to look at but to feel — vibrant fields of emotion where colour becomes temperature and light becomes memory. The trees seem alive yet solitary, their roots steeped in silence, their trunks pulsing with heat. In her world, nature is not a scene to be observed but a living rhythm. It is wild, tender, and endlessly human.

No, these works that you see are not macro shooting. These are paintings made by Iranian artist Taher Mousavi, acrylic on canvas.

Mousavi approaches nature with both reverence and unease. In his hands, the landscape becomes something larger than sight — vast, silent, a little unsettling. His paintings move between reality and abstraction, between what we recognise and what we only sense. In each of them, beauty and fragility coexist — a reminder that nature can be both tender and immense.

You have definitely seen Hossein Khoshraftar’s stunning trees.

In his 2024 exhibition The Trees Which I Am, Hossein Khoshraftar speaks about trees not as subjects, but as mirrors of existence. On the gallery’s website, he writes: “Everything is realised in existence, coming out of the ground, growing taller and pulling a branch everywhere. Existence sometimes comes to reality and sometimes to the mind. Here are the trees that have roots and stand — the more naked they stand, the more obvious their resistance is.”

For Khoshraftar, trees are living metaphors of endurance and belonging.

“When you explore the desert,” he writes, “you can see an oasis in the corner — the green spot on the desert plate. This is where hopes come together. I am an oasis born, lost in the crowds of oases… I am hopes, as well as trees.”

Arman Yaghoubpour’s relationship with nature has always been at the heart of his work. Rooted in the stillness of rural Iran, his paintings carry the rhythm of open fields, distant trees, and skies heavy with light. Trained in painting and art research, he has become one of Iran’s most admired contemporary artists — a painter who turns simplicity into strength.

Yaghoubpour returns again and again to the countryside — to its quiet lines of trees, its low houses, its shifting light. His landscapes are pared back to what the eye almost forgets to notice: rhythm, distance, the slow movement of colour across open ground.

Working with thick layers of acrylic, Yaghoubpour builds landscapes that seem to stretch beyond the frame — vast, quiet spaces where colour breathes and distance feels tangible. There is a sense of air and openness in his work, a kind of freedom that belongs only to the horizon.