Mehrdad Aref-Adib is an Iranian-born, London-based fine artist and illustrator, Mehrdad’s work captures the essence of his dual heritage, weaving together nostalgia, culture, and art with humour. Mehrdad is an important part of the Lauderdale House family and is for the second year curating our entire Nowruz Festival. To learn more about Mehrdad and his work, please visit his Instagram.
Sahar Khaleghi is an Iranian artist now based in London. Her art passionately addresses the pressing concerns of her homeland. Sahar’s works have been exhibited in numerous countries around the world, including the UK, Germany, Estonia, Greece, and China. In 2018, Sahar was honoured with the Special Award at the International Gold Panda Cartoon and Illustration competition in China. Recently, her art featured prominently at the 52nd Belgrade Golden Pen Illustration Festival exhibition! and has gained recognition in several international magazines. Having grown up as a young woman in Iran, Sahar has choosen to weave modern and historical influences into her art, aiming to illuminate the experiences of women across cultures. Through her creations, Sahar seeks to convey powerful narratives that transcend borders, speaking to the challenges and triumphs of women worldwide. To learn more about Sahar and her work, please visit her website, her Instagram or her Facebook page.
Sahar Haghgoo is an illustrator and painter originally from Iran and now based in London. Her work explores the concepts of beauty and the sublime, focusing on the interplay between these two ideas. Sahar examines how beauty can evoke pleasure and satisfaction, while the sublime inspired feelings of awe, respect, and even fear. It seems that by drawing and visualizing monsters, Sahar discovers unknown parts of herself, and by shaping them, she also shapes her own existence and nature. Her work is deeply connected to the aesthetics of nature, exploring themes of monsters in nature, the unknown, change and transformation, and the destruction of beauty. Sahar is particularly interested in exploring this contrast through themes of size and proportion, familiarity and unfamiliarity, and the emotional responses they elicit. She often work with different techniques to capture these nuances and create pieces that invite viewers to consider the complex relationship between these seemingly opposing forces. To learn more about Sahar and her work, please visit her website or her Instagram.
Shokoufeh Fallah is a London-based Iranian Printmaker. While drawing and painting are important parts of her practice, printmaking holds a special place in Shokoufeh’s work thanks to its exquisite texture, its relation to fertility and birth, and the way the tools allow her to reach a world fraught with expressive colours, lines and textures. Shokoufeh is influenced by various themes, from that of womanhood and eroticism, which are ingrained with expressive colours and create intense, two-fold, intermingled spaces, to the reciprocity of life and death, which is accompanied with elements like fish, birds and trees taking away their freedom through rigid lines entangling them. Humans, forms and colours of her works are accompanied with a sort of embroilment, along with a sizzling rhythm which catapults Shokoufeh out from her inner world together with a cultural nostalgia, allowing her to conceive the persistence of life in the outer world through clinging the colours and forms. To learn more about Shokoufeh and her work, please visit her website.
