Shiva Ahmadi

Through her work, Shiva Ahmadi addresses critical global issues, including political oppression, violence, immigration, and women’s rights, informed by current events and her own experiences. Born in Tehran, Iran in 1975, Ahmadi came of age in the tumultuous years following the Iranian Revolution and subsequent Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. She moved to the United States in 1998, and has been based in California since 2015.

Utilizing a variety of artistic media that includes painting, sculpture, and animation, Ahmadi fuses formal beauty with an undercurrent of violence. Her newest body of work marks a return to her foundational roots as a figurative painter. In these latest pieces, Ahmadi plays with female figures within vibrant landscapes, surrounded by exotic flora and fauna. This lush imagery is contrasted with partially obscured, silk-screened images of ruins. By inserting images that read as ruins or clues to a deeper story, Ahmadi probes what lies hidden beneath the surface of the stories we are told, from ancient myths to childhood memories to the current news cycle.

Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA; Asia Society Museum, New York, NY; and Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, and included in group exhibitions at Rubin Museum of Art, New York, NY; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY; Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha Qatar; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada. Ahmadi’s work is collected by institutions including the Asia Society Museum, New York, NY; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY; Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA.

Ahmadi has been awarded the ‘Anonymous Was A Woman’ Award and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (both 2016); and a residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbertide, Italy (2018). Shiva Ahmadi, a hardbound monograph of her work, was published in 2017 by Skira.