Jong Talent 2006, KABK Den Haag.

Three years before I left Iran, i moved from my town Arak to the capital Teheran. This city has more than 17 million inhabitants and is growing fast. Chaotic and organised structures are creating a typical metropolitan atmosphere. From Teherean I moved to The Netherlands, where I studied 4 years in The Hague. I visited some big cities in Europe as well, like London. The construction of these type of metropoles or big cities are inspiring me. My life is a trip through different big cities.

For my work there are struggles which are motivating me - to answer questions like:
'What to paint in this (digital) age that we are living?'
'How to introduce the (new) media like (digital) photography and technological advances in image-making to painting?'
These are the central concerns of my work as a painter.

Living in a city and being surrounded by the elements of it (buildings, mobility, highways, posters, flyers, maps, etc) are inspiring me and they are the motives of my work.
I started with making many photographs with my digital camera in the city, manipulating them in photoshop (framing, stretching, outlining the shapes, cropping) and using the prints as a (sketch) starting point for paintings.
I started with a series of cars, because they are one of the elements of the city which changed the environments the most. Their hard shapes and monochromic metallic colours inspired me to make hard-edge paintings with glossy paint on canvas and later on aluminium.
The material is relevant to the concept and the culture of our society.
The next painting was inspired by the map of the underground in London, that opened up a way of working, whereby i started to focus more on the idea (of the map as a simplified product / concept) of the reality.

My plans for coming years are to study in Goldsmiths University of London (master of fine art) and to produce paintings with the same subject (motives of city), experimenting with different materials (painting on plexiglass, using stickers instead of paint); applying the same idea that I achieved in the map-painting and developing it to the wider range of motives, in the same time spending more time with my photographs and making videos of city life.