Shirin Tabeshfar

Shirin was born in 1958 in Tehran. She studied at the Behzad Art school under the guidance of Iran’s ‘Pioneer’ generation of artists, including Mohammad Jafari and Gholamhosein Nami, who were instrumental in bringing western modernism to the country. In1977 she moved to UK. Later she went to Bath academy of art and studied BA in Graphic design.

Shirin’s work often explores images of the past, a painter whose canvases are often divided; fascination with the relationship between order and chaos, a determinedly contemporary artist intrigued by the past. She is combining elements of symbolism, spirituality and a sense of time in her work.

Clearly, years of patient and laborious research, has moved her painting towards a simplification of forms to the extreme. Liberated almost from the subject, Shirin tries to challenge the world of forms. The formal rigour is now in place, at the greatest count.

Shirin’s paintings are organized around the balance of subtle colour fields, on a grey background or white with a translucent dullness. They are a "semblance" of everyday objects, reduced to ghostly forms, and far from being frozen, they seem to move on the canvas. Sometimes the fine and liquid material of acrylic paint lets the naked canvas appear. Shirin attains a kind of abstraction both rigorous and poetic.

From tableau to tableau we discover a change in the layout of her canvas: the drips of paint sometimes fill the whole space. Ones gaze is lost in a maze of lines, all in a continuous composition, without edges or centre. Yet the layout of the lines keeps the impression of the order and the controlled gesture of the artist.

In her latest compositions, Shirin asserts a certain nostalgia for Iranian art. She is inspired by the printed fabrics (Ghalamkar) of Isfahan, and creates canvases with subtle tones, punctuated by motifs and writing. Thus it pays homage to an age-old art: the tablecloths, curtains, cushions and bedspreads that once brightened Persian interiors. 

From figurative to abstract, Shirin's art manages to keep its innate freshness, in a world of silent poetry.

Shirin’s work is held in private collections in the UK, Germany, France and USA.