Sameh Khalatbari
Sameh Khalatbari is a San Francisco based artist, born in Tehran, Iran. She graduated from the University of Tehran with a Masters of Fine Art. She has exhibited internationally in Iran, United Arab of Emirate, Germany, Italy, and throughout California, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 2013 she was granted a genius visa as an Extra Ordinary Ability Artist from the United States government and for residence in California.
Khalatbari is a contemporary surrealist painter and reveals her life experience and thoughts with familiar Persian symbols and aesthetically composed conceptually layered artworks. Traditional Islamic symmetrical painting that she has studied extensively, have influenced her art works with symbols both prominently featured and subtlety revealed and concealed in them.
On September 16, 2022, a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini was beaten to death in Tehran. As a woman who’d been forced to cover her hair before emigrating to the United States, Khalatbari felt intense distress. “I felt a responsibility to be the voice of the people in Iran and to spread the word with my art,” she recalls. “But I couldn’t be direct. I still have family there. When I visit, I could be arrested.” Her art could not be figurative, as it had been in the past. “I thought of using the lines I’d drawn as a symbol of women’s hair.”
In aesthetic terms, Khalatbari’s abstract canvases evoke the artwork of Eva Hesse, deriving their strength from her mastery of raw materials and physical forces. This visceral effect is counterbalanced by Khalatbari’s commitment to symbolism in relation to color, connecting her work to Bauhaus masters such as Johannes Itten and Wassily Kandinsky.
Yet Khalatbari distinguishes herself from these aesthetic forebears because her art is also resolutely political. For many artists, abstraction and politics would be in tension. Khalatbari balances them as meticulously and elegantly as a mathematical equation.
Submitted by Modernism Inc.
