< back

About Bahar Sabzevari

 

Bio

Bahar Sabzevari is an Iranian artist exploring identity through self-portraiture, narrative painting and video art. In her most recent series of self-portraits, she questions the Iranians’ tendency and obsession to praise the past. Why do we romanticize Persian history which is so far from the realities of our contemporary life? Integrating Persian motifs, religious details and characters into her self-portraits, Sabzevari explores the concept of nostalgia and creates illusions of a lost age of glory. Sabzevari earlier self-portraits focus on contemporary Iranian society. In the “Bad Girls” series, Sabzevari explores the paradoxes she has experienced, being a woman caught between the restrictions of the Islamic cultural regime and everyday existence living in modern time. Sabzevari lives and works in New York. She was born in 1980, Shahroud, Iran, and spent most of her life in Tehran before leaving for Paris in 2003 to study and experience art in Europe.. She moved to New York in 2012 and gained an MFA in painting at the New York Academy of Art in 2018 and she has been the recipient of the Central Academy of Fine Arts Residency in Beijing, China summer of 2017.

CV

Education

2018 MFA, New York Academy of Art

2008 BFA, Université Paris 8

Exhibitions

2018 Magic in Monaco, Kamil Art Gallery, Monte Carlo, Monaco

2018 Theses Show, New York Academy of Art, New York

2017 Summer Residency Exhibition, Cheng Xi Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China

2014 Solo show, Watson institute, Brown University, Providence, RI,

2013 Tirgan, Toronto, Canada

2012 Iranian Arts Now, Cité internationale des Arts, Paris

2012 In The Currents, Bay Area Iranian/American Art today, Oakland, CA

2011 The Mask and The Mirror, Leila Heller Gallery, New York

2011 Bahar Sabzevari & Omid Hallaj, RX Gallery, Paris

2010 Sous Le Radar, La jeune scène Iranienne, JTM Gallery, Paris

2010 FIAC Art Fair, Paris

Residency

2017 The Central Academy of Fine Arts Residency in Beijing, China