Gallery
Shaqayeq Ahmadian doesn't paint a world — she lives inside one. A painter and sculptor whose creatures step out of the canvas and into sculpture.
Shaqayeq Ahmadian builds a world and lives inside it — wild, tender, teeming.
Shaqayeq Ahmadian is a painter and sculptor who doesn't so much depict a world as live inside one. Born in northern Iran and raised in Mazandaran until she was nineteen, she spent her childhood among trees, animals, and the sea — a landscape whose strange forms and quiet life ran so deep that it still shapes everything she makes. Painting was her closest friend from the age of seven or eight, and by around ten she had already mounted her first solo show in Sari, before moving to Tehran to study art and find others like herself. She works across media, treating painting and sculpture as one continuous world: oil on canvas alongside clay, molds, resin, plastic, and discarded materials she folds back into her forms. Her sculptures step out of her paintings and take on bodies — birds, fish, half-human creatures — and a single figure may be built from many smaller cast pieces joined into one whole. Her images tell non-linear stories, closer to fate than to plot, drawn from her attention to people and their inner solitude — the sense that everyone lives inside their own mind, one face on the outside and another within. Ahmadian has shown her work in Tehran and abroad, from London and Berlin to New York, and describes the path from her first northern exhibition to now as a sea — sometimes calm, sometimes stormy — that demanded patience and a thickening skin. She lives and works alongside her husband Ali, a partner in both life and art for over a decade. Drawing on Gothic and classical elements, her forms are often deformed and unconventional, chosen not for prettiness but for meaning — and when her days grew darker, she learned to call the light back into the work.