Soraya Sharghi: Sculpture and Painting in Paris ^{CEFR B2}

In October 2025, during Art Basel week in Paris, Soraya Sharghi presented "Sculpture and Painting" at 24 Avenue Matignon. The exhibition brought together recent bronze, ceramic and painting works in a single immersive space and emphasised hybrid figures and hand-shaped ceramic guardians. The show included the painting "Rising with the Song of Nymphs" (2022) and framed myth and memory as methods of survival and rebirth within her practice.

Born in 1988 in Tehran and based in New York, Sharghi studied at the San Francisco Art Institute. At SFAI she experimented with painting, sculpture and installation simultaneously; the school pushed her to view her culture from a distance and to define herself beyond geography and expectation. From an early stage she treated the female body not as provocation but as a site of emotion, healing and reclaimed presence.

Sharghi works across materials because each medium offers a different language. She says clay taught patience and surrender while painting demands honesty. She often uses glazes like pigments, building layers as if she were "painting with fire," and she describes a creative tension between discipline and rebellion that shapes her work. Her time in Jingdezhen, China, deepened her ceramics study: arriving while war and unrest unfolded in Iran, she spent weeks letting her hands speak through clay. In Isfahan she encountered old embossed-glazed cups and developed Sofal-e Berjasteh-inspired pieces. Hybrid female figures—combining human, animal and mythological traits—act as self-created guardians shaped by restriction, migration and negotiated womanhood, and her monumental ceramics, born of firing and cracking, stand as portraits of resilience.

In an interview with Global Voices she reflected on imagination, hybridity, mythmaking and the continuing alchemy of clay, fire and color in her expanding universe.