Bahar Sabzevari

Bahar Sabzevari was born in 1980 in Iran, where she spent most of her life before leaving for Paris in 2003 to study painting.  Sabzevari's works become a testimony to the weight religion has put on Iranian society, while responding to the pressures she has felt as a woman and an artist. She uses religious rituals, characters, and symbols as her props, and a backdrop to emotionally charged deformed and unfolding figure of women- often herself- to portray  a "quasi" schizophrenic state, still responsive to the societal obligations while feeling suffocated by their restrictions.  A commentary on the paradoxes she has experienced in the crossings of modernity with religious fundamentalism, her works express a continuous conflict with the roles defined for her as a woman in Islam and the reality of her everyday existence. Her work has been featured in exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York and Paris amongst other cities. Sabzevari has recently moved to New York where she continues to pursue her career as a painter.