Azadeh Razaghdoost

An overview of Azadeh Razaghdoost’s works in the form of a unique installation of her several series will be displayed at Shirin Art Gallery, during which the artist’s later works are exhibited along with older collections.
Born in 1979 in Tehran, Azadeh Razaghdoost studied at Tehran School of Art and graduated from Tehran University of Art in 2000. She often maintains a romanticist viewpoint, and her art seems excessively emotional and expressive in tone. The concepts unconsciously introduced in her works are at times ambiguous and misleading. Her series are usually displayed, taking their names after lines of poetry from renowned poets such as Charles Baudelaire, William Blake, and Ingeborg Bachmann. She does not ask the viewer to assess her painting based on the poems. Rather, poetry is merely used to enhance the space, mood, and the atmosphere in which Razaghdoost’s works are produced. The use of poetry is perhaps additional, or perhaps she wants to reveal her introspective nature as a painter by means of this additional tool. In Razaghdoost’s artistic procedure, we observe the representation of concepts such as agony and anger, while color crimson is inspired by the sanctity of blood. Her most recent series, In the Storm of Roses, which is named after a poem of the same title by German poet and philosopher Bachmann, implies a highly expressive notion of love, as though it had been experienced through a whirlwind of crimson and simmering emotions scattered in space. Blood in her work is a sign of vitality, while the notions of love and lust are recurrently recalled all over the work. Using a pencil is like a climax or an ending in her works.
They are by no means classified as Middle Eastern, and her expression lacks political or exotic edges. The blank canvas, the pencil-work scribbles and writings, tender shades of blue, the dirty pink and slight touches of gold besides massive amounts of crimson are distinct features of her painting that make her unique among her peers. 
In Razaghdoost’s paintings, a different and eccentric experience of beauty is observed, and akin to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), a sense of ennui, decline, and mortality is felt in a constant cycle of strength and fragility.
Her brush strokes are keenly expressionistic: her flowers are drawn in an abstract style. Crimson flowers, triangles, and vases are reminiscent of wombs and hearts. Not because of her femininity or having female audiences in mind. She just happens to be a female artist that makes use of these shapes. She is rather concerned with their erotic features than solely pursuing gender-based values.
Her obsession with blood, body, and sickness is rooted in her childhood dream of becoming a physician – a heart surgeon