Iranian artist Golnaz Afraz lives and works near Strasbourg, France. Born in Tehran in 1981, she completed her undergraduate degree in Painting at the University of Azad in her native city before obtaining two Masters in Fine Art, the first conferred by the University of Tarbiat Modarres in Tehran in 2007 and the second by the University of Strasbourg in France in 2011.
Golnaz won the 2023 Villa Seurat Foundation commission to create a monumental painting for the permanent collection of the Maison des étudiants de la Francophonie in the Cité International Universitaire de Paris campus, which was unveiled in 2024.
In 2015 Golnaz won Saatchi Art’s Showdown: The Painted World competition, which was entered by over 5,000 artists worldwide and culminated in an exhibition of work by the 30 shortlisted artists in Los Angeles. The judges singled out her masterful use of colour and distinctive compositional style.
In her work Golnaz pays tribute to everyday life in all its technicoloured complexity. Her intention is to create a story and to allow the viewer to draw their own conclusions. The starting point might be the memory of a scene from daily life or from a play or film she has seen. Golnaz also comments on her native country Iran’s treatment of women as second-class citizens and how it stifles their freedom of expression, as well as on women in general who find themselves unseen and unheard, either in their relationships or in society. Her female figures are often depicted with their eyes closed or their faces partially obscured by leaves or flowers to symbolise that.
Some of Golnaz’s latest work is a direct response to the recent protests in Iran, paying tribute to some of young protesters who died at the hands of the country’s security forces and to the brave women and men who made their voices heard.
Plants, omnipresent in Golnaz’s paintings, represent the relationship between people and nature as she comments on the importance of nature for our well-being, as well as the damage we are inflicting on it and our efforts to protect it.
Golnaz paints this reality in multiple layers, depicting various fragments of time on the same plane and overlapping forms. She leaves sections of her paintings unfinished or in sketch form to invite the viewer’s interpretations and give the work space to breathe. Her juxtaposition of colourful, expressive painted areas, blank spaces and snapshot-style line-drawn figures interacting in everyday situations, arranged apparently randomly across the canvas, creates unique compositions of immense vitality, in which, ultimately, the graphic quality prevails.
Golnaz has participated in numerous exhibitions and art fairs in Europe and the Middle East since 2005, most recently solo shows at the Centre d’Art de la Ville de Dudelange in Luxembourg and at Autour de l’Image in Lyon in 2024 and 2021, and at Galerie Latuvu near Narbonne in 2023, and groups shows including at Galerie Brulée in Strasbourg in 2024 and 2022, Riana Raouna Gallery in Nicosia, Cyprus in 2023 and Galerie Au-delà des Apparences in Annecy in 2021.
Golnaz has exhibited with Gala Fine Art at Battersea Affordable Art Fair several times since 2017 and annually at London Art Fair since 2022. We were delighted to show her paintings at the Affordable Art Fair in Amsterdam in 2023 and 2024, and in Brussels in February 2025.
