Seyedeh Hakimeh Ebrahimi
Winner Challenge
2023
ROYA EBRAHIMI
Iran · 1987
Painting · Surrealism · Figurative Art · Illustration
BIOGRAPHY
Seyedeh Roya Ebrahimi is an Iranian painter, graphic designer, illustrator and art teacher born in 1987.
Her multidisciplinary education has played an important role in the development of her visual language. She holds a Master's degree in Graphics – Visual Communication , a Bachelor's degree in Graphics, Print Design and an Associate degree in Graphics.
Alongside her painting practice, Ebrahimi has worked extensively in visual education, teaching painting, colour theory, brush techniques, mixed media, digital painting, mural painting and graphic design at different educational institutions.
Her professional background also includes illustration. She created illustrations for five published educational books dedicated to first-grade reading, while her graphic works have appeared in several editions of the Baban Graphic of the Year publication.
Ebrahimi's artistic language moves between reality and surrealism.
Rather than reproducing the visible world literally, she transforms elements taken from her surroundings into symbolic images shaped by memory, emotion, imagination and cultural references.
Iranian history, literature and visual culture are particularly significant within her practice. Her interest in the cultural heritage of Iran has led her to engage with narratives including the Shahnameh , the monumental epic tradition associated with the poet Ferdowsi.
Her exhibition activity includes solo and group exhibitions in Iran and internationally, including presentations in Tehran, Isfahan and Istanbul. In 2024 she held an individual exhibition at Kahfi Visual Arts Gallery in Tehran.
Her recognitions include first place at the Iron Pen, a People's Choice distinction in an elementary school book-cover illustration festival, participation certificates connected with the Fajr Visual Arts Festival and a Certificate of Appreciation from the Roshd National Photography and Illustration Festival.
Her work has also been published internationally, including through NNC Gallery London.
For Roya Ebrahimi, reality is not something that painting must reproduce.
It is material to be transformed.
Her artistic process begins with the surrounding world but gradually moves away from literal representation. Familiar elements acquire different roles, objects become symbols and real environments enter territories governed by imagination.
Ebrahimi understands art as a meeting point between **reality, hope, dream and emotion**.
Although her paintings can retain a recognisable relationship with nature and the human figure, their meaning is constructed through subjective experience rather than objective description.
This creates the particular tension within her work between realism and surrealism.
The visible world provides the vocabulary.
Imagination changes its grammar.
Beauty also remains important within Ebrahimi's understanding of artistic practice. Rather than treating beauty as decoration, she considers it a means through which art can provide reflection, emotional refuge and connection.
Her paintings consequently seek to preserve the emotional dimension of experience while opening a space in which reality can be reconstructed through imagination.
Statement
For Roya Ebrahimi, reality is not something that painting must reproduce.
It is material to be transformed.
Her artistic process begins with the surrounding world but gradually moves away from literal representation. Familiar elements acquire different roles, objects become symbols and real environments enter territories governed by imagination.
Ebrahimi understands art as a meeting point between **reality, hope, dream and emotion**.
Although her paintings can retain a recognisable relationship with nature and the human figure, their meaning is constructed through subjective experience rather than objective description.
This creates the particular tension within her work between realism and surrealism.
The visible world provides the vocabulary.
Imagination changes its grammar.
Beauty also remains important within Ebrahimi's understanding of artistic practice. Rather than treating beauty as decoration, she considers it a means through which art can provide reflection, emotional refuge and connection.
Her paintings consequently seek to preserve the emotional dimension of experience while opening a space in which reality can be reconstructed through imagination.
WHY COLLECT ROYA EBRAHIMI
Roya Ebrahimi's work offers an interesting position for collectors interested in contemporary figurative and surreal painting emerging from cultural traditions that remain underrepresented within many Western collections.
Her work combines several elements that give her practice a distinctive identity: figurative painting, surrealism, illustration, Persian cultural references and a highly developed symbolic vocabulary
Her academic and professional background in graphic design and illustration contributes to the clarity of her compositions and to her ability to construct images capable of functioning simultaneously as paintings and narratives.
Particularly significant is her relationship with Iranian cultural heritage.
Rather than treating tradition as something fixed, Ebrahimi transforms references to Persian literature and visual culture into material for contemporary artistic research.
This allows her work to occupy an interesting territory between cultural continuity and personal reinvention.
Recurring symbols , including water, fish, dreamlike figures and transformed landscapes, also create continuity across different works and contribute to the development of a recognisable artistic universe.
For new collectors, her paintings provide an accessible entrance through figurative imagery while revealing additional layers connected with symbolism, literature, memory and imagination.
Her continued activity as a painter, illustrator and educator, together with exhibitions, publications and professional recognitions, demonstrates a sustained commitment to visual practice.
For NNC Gallery, Roya Ebrahimi represents an artist whose work should be read not through a single image but through the rogressive construction of a personal mythology**.
As with every acquisition of contemporary art, collecting should begin with a genuine connection to the artwork. Future financial or market value can never be guaranteed.
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THE PROJECT
SEVEN READERS OF ROSTAM
Seven Readers of Rostam emerges from Roya Ebrahimi's relationship with Iranian cultural memory and her fascination with the Shahnameh, one of the central works of Persian literary heritage.
Rather than approaching this tradition as historical illustration, Ebrahimi incorporates its imaginative potential into her own contemporary visual universe.
Her broader series describes the inhabitants of what the artist calls a dreamland.
These figures exist in a territory where the separation between symbols, icons and reality gradually disappears.
Reality becomes imagination.
Imagination becomes reality.
Ebrahimi imagines this dreamland not as an already existing place, but as something its inhabitants must construct themselves.
The passage towards it requires a different form of perception: the ability to listen to one's inner world and to recover something resembling the imaginative freedom of childhood.
Within this symbolic universe, water functions as a threshold between everyday existence and the dreamland, while the fish becomes a symbol of life.
These recurring elements create a visual mythology in which individual paintings operate as fragments of a larger narrative.
The reference to Rostam and the Persian epic tradition consequently becomes part of a contemporary exploration of cultural memory, imagination and transformation.
Ebrahimi does not simply reproduce an inherited story.
She allows inherited imagery and contemporary imagination to encounter one another.
The result is a space suspended between cultural memory and personal mythology.
CURATORIAL TEXT
#SEVEN READERS OF ROSTAM: WHEN MEMORY BECOMES IMAGINATION
NNC Gallery London Project — Curatorial Department
Every culture produces stories capable of surviving the historical circumstances in which they were created.
Their survival, however, depends upon transformation.
Roya Ebrahimi's relationship with Persian cultural heritage begins precisely here.
Her paintings do not attempt to reconstruct the past.
They reactivate it.
Within *Seven Readers of Rostam*, the imaginary world associated with Persian epic tradition encounters an intensely personal visual universe populated by symbols, transformed figures and dreamlike spaces.
The distinction is important.
Illustration tells us what happened.
Ebrahimi appears more interested in asking what an inherited story can become.
Her background as an illustrator and graphic designer gives her considerable control over visual narration, but painting allows that narrative to escape the obligation of linear storytelling.
A figure can simultaneously belong to a story and to a dream.
An object can retain its recognisable form while acquiring another meaning.
A landscape can become psychological.
This instability between what we recognise and what we imagine is one of the most compelling characteristics of Ebrahimi's work.
The artist herself describes a dreamland in which the boundary separating reality, symbol and imagination progressively fades.
This dreamland has its own visual vocabulary.
Water is passage.
The fish is life.
The people inhabiting this territory are not simply passive characters. They participate in its construction.
This gives Ebrahimi's imagery an unexpectedly contemporary dimension.
The dream is not presented as an escape from reality.
It is another way of reorganising it.
Her interest in the Shahnameh therefore becomes especially significant.
Cultural heritage can easily become static when it is approached exclusively as something to preserve. Ebrahimi instead treats it as living material: something capable of entering contemporary imagination and generating new images.
Her paintings exist precisely within this movement between inheritance and invention.
The real becomes symbolic. The symbolic becomes personal. The personal reconnects with collective memory. And then the cycle begins again.
Perhaps this explains the childlike dimension Ebrahimi associates with entering her dreamland.
Children accept transformations that adults have learned to reject.
A fish can be more than a fish.
Water can become a gateway.
A figure can inhabit several realities simultaneously.
Painting restores this possibility.
In Seven Readers of Rostam, Roya Ebrahimi does not ask us simply to enter another world.
She asks whether imagination might allow us to see our own world differently.
And somewhere between an ancient story and a contemporary image, between memory and invention, her dreamland begins to exist.
