These artists come from different generations and work across different media, but what connects them is a shared attention to personal experience as a way of understanding the world. Their practices grow out of everyday life, memory, political tension, and lived reality — not as direct statements, but as layered visual narratives.

They move between intimacy and history, between private emotion and collective experience, using painting, drawing, and mixed media to speak about identity, power, vulnerability, and resistance.

Born in 1990 in Tehran, Ghazal Marvi is a keen observer of the world around her, with much of her visual language shaped by everyday life. Her paintings often draw from scenes connected to the younger generation in her hometown.

Through a vibrant and colourful palette, she captures the paradox of joy and restriction, revealing how excitement and playfulness can exist alongside limitation.

Arghavan Khosravi was born in Shahr-e Kord and is now based in the United States. She is known for richly detailed, surreal works that draw from Persian miniatures, Western art history, and her own personal experience. Her works are not just paintings — she brings architectural and sculptural elements into them, using materials like stone and wood, which make the works feel multidimensional.

Her visual language is highly symbolic. Through her work, she shows what truly concerns her, exploring themes of power, gender, control, and resistance. Female figures often appear in ornate yet restrictive spaces, turning her personal worries and questions into strong visual statements.

Zartosht Rahimi was born in 1989 in Isfahan and now lives and works in Tehran. He studied graphic design and painting, and you can really feel that in his practice — he doesn’t think in single images. His work moves between painting, drawing, installation, and sometimes video, and for him it’s always about building a wider visual language rather than one isolated piece.

He often works with social and political themes, but never in a straightforward or didactic way. Familiar figures, uniforms, and everyday objects appear in his works, but he shifts them just enough to make them feel strange or unsettling. Through this, he talks about power, militarisation, identity, and the contradictions of contemporary life. Even though the topics can be heavy, his works stay visually energetic, often using colour, humour, and irony.

Maeyede Salar was born in 1991 in Amol. Her work doesn’t follow clear or linear narratives — instead, it gently pulls you into emotional states shaped by memory and personal experience.

Drawing plays a central role in her practice. Maeyede reveals things that are often right in front of us but easy to overlook, opening up new possibilities for artists who value drawing as a way of thinking. Beneath the playful surfaces — carnivalesque elements like bright colours, cakes, rabbits, rainbows, and skies — her works touch on much darker realities. Many of her drawings reflect political tension and gender dynamics, especially the pressure of male-dominated structures. That contrast is key to her work: sweetness and fear, fantasy and control, existing side by side.

Nicky Nodjoumi was born in 1942 in Kermanshah, Iran, and is now based in Brooklyn, New York. He studied fine arts at the University of Tehran before moving to the United States in the late 1960s, where he later earned his MFA from The City College of New York. From early on, both his life and his work were shaped by politics, displacement, and moments of historical rupture.

His work often explores themes of power, authority, and resistance, using fragmented figures and charged compositions that feel both historical and unsettlingly current. Over the decades, Nodjoumi’s work has entered major institutional collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum in London, the Guggenheim Museum Abu Dhabi, the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, and the National Museum of Cuba in Havana.