Laleh Khorramian

Laleh Khorramian (b. 1974 Tehran, Iran) studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI), received her undergraduate degree at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), and her MFA at Columbia University (New York, NY). 

Khorramian’s practice incorporates the cosmological thinking of ancient cultures, their complex mythologies and spiritual vocabularies, with her own imagined worlds, synthesizing them into “histories” that are both futuristic and ancient. Khorramian approaches her work as a series of experiments with the process of chance as a starting point for discovering possibilities of the unknown. Her process often begins with the monotype, made by applying oil paint onto glass, from which a unique paper print is made, whose details and outcomes she then investigates and repositions. In a vacillating process between macro and micro views of these painted landscapes and incidental spaces, Khorramian integrates fiction with spectacle and theater to explore the transience of living matter and examine the essence of their visual forms and emotional content.

Her work of the past decade has spanned stop motion animation films, sound, light, monoprints, drawings, painted landscapes, portraits, and collage. In her stop-motion animations, she uses the latent and textured topographical imagery of her prints to find scenes, objects and figures for her cinematic sagas. By removing cultural or historical specificity from her narratives, she uses the ordinary to portray the epic and the universal, in a search for worlds just beyond the concrete, material one around us.

An innate creative, Khorramian also produces works using found material and textiles; in 2013 she launched the clothing line Laloon, as an extension of her artistic practice.

Khorramian has exhibited internationally in both solo and group exhibitions including but not limited to; Perpetual Inventory, Volume 1: An Exercise in Looking ,The Third Line, Dubai, UAE (2022); The Refracted Body, Liverpool Biennale, Liverpool, UK (2021); Earthly, Esther Massry Gallery, The College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY, USA (2021);Sentients, Fine Art Center Gallery, University of Arkansas, Arkansas, USA (2020); Drawn: Concept and Craft, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston Salem, NC, USA (2020);Unearth, September Gallery, Hudson, New York, USA (2019); Saturns Neckless, The Third Line, Dubai, UAE (2016); Midnight Moment: Laleh Khorramian, Times Square, New York, USA (2014); to name a few. 

Khorramian currently lives and works in upstate New York.