Born in 1986, Maryam Abedi grew up in Tehran, Iran. After receiving BFA from the University of Tehran, she moved to New York to continue studies at the New York Academy of Art. Maryam now lives and works in Tehran, Iran.

Her personal style includes cutting, arranging, and piecing together the canvas fabric. In doing so, she preserves and cherishes traditional achievements of painting, rendering them with reverent care and insight. Her allusion to the act of painting is also evident in her coloring technique: She supplements an abstract structure with textures and brush strokes of traditional figurative oil painting, thus bringing together painterly and minimal attitudes.

The boundaries between categories of artistic conventions are blurred and discarded as a new approach emerges which is simultaneously modest and assertive. It evokes patchworks and carpet-making on the one hand, and Baroque tones and hues on the other, thereby conjuring up humble needlework and grand historical art at the same time. All these can be placed together and produce novel patterns and significances by means of a method that seeks to provide ample opportunities to continue the ancient painting tradition through a reunion with another age-old tradition: carpet-making and its full internal vigor.

“My works have their roots in the history of painting. The process behind my paintings is important to me. This process focuses on different subject matters within the painting, such as the idea of the canvas as a support material. The result is minimal paintings with horizontal and vertical lines. These lines have been created by folded canvas strips that have been weaved together. The idea of my technique comes from two different sources; first one the fact that I beside my artistic practice, work as a cloth designer and also making clothes and second, from the tradition of carpet making which I have a close relation to and also has a deep root in my home country Iran.”

Maryam Abedi’s recent exhibitions include Ragchin, Iranshahr Gallery 2018, Piecing Together, Iranshahr Gallery, 2016, and Dead palette, Iranian Artist Forum.