Masoudeh Miri (b. 1985, Zahedan, Iran) is a Turin-based figurative artist whose practice converges at the intersection of painting and architecture. Formally trained in architecture in Italy, she developed her distinct painterly language independently, utilizing her spatial expertise to investigate the psychological layers of memory, environment, and female subjectivity.
Her background in architecture profoundly shapes her attention to structure, geometric tension, and the domestic or public thresholds her subjects inhabit. Subtle echoes of Persian visual traditions, literature, and spatial philosophy inform her work, particularly in the rendering of symbolic landscapes and suspended environments. Through complex, layered imagery developed primarily on paper, Masoudeh constructs visual narratives where bodies occupy fragile spaces of vulnerability, collective memory, and socio-political resistance. Her work has been exhibited both in Italy and internationally.
about
Painting is where I wrestle with the world. It is where I think, question and gradually understand what cannot be grasped through words alone. Every painting begins with an incomplete vision: a sentence, a dream, an image that insists on returning, or an intuition whose meaning has yet to emerge. I never begin with certainty. I move through the painting one step at a time, allowing the work to reveal connections that I could not foresee. The finished painting almost always surprises me. By then, it has become something other than the image that first set it in motion.
I do not paint history itself. I paint what history leaves behind. I am drawn to the splinters that events leave embedded within bodies, architecture and the spaces we inhabit—fragments that settle quietly over time before resurfacing in altered forms. Rather than reconstructing events or illustrating memory, my paintings emerge from the slow process through which experience is absorbed, transformed and made visible. Some works originate years after the event that first generated them, once time has allowed those experiences to sediment and acquire a different form.
Formally trained as an architect, I conceive space as an active psychological structure rather than a backdrop. Thresholds, interiors and built environments are never passive settings but places where emotional, historical and symbolic tensions accumulate. Architecture preserves what cannot be spoken just as bodies do. Neither functions as a container; both become active participants in the transformation of experience. It is within this reciprocal relationship that my paintings unfold.
I work primarily with acrylic on paper, building each painting through successive translucent glazes. Some layers are anticipated, while others emerge only as the work develops. There is never a predetermined number of glazes. I proceed one step at a time, responding to what the surface reveals, until the painting itself tells me where the process must stop. This process echoes the way experience, memory and history settle over time: not as fixed narratives, but as overlapping layers that are constantly rewritten by what follows.
Literature, philosophy and historical research accompany my practice, yet painting remains its essential form of inquiry. I do not use painting to illustrate what I already know; I paint in order to discover what I do not yet understand. Each work is the record of that search—a place where intuition slowly becomes knowledge, and where meanings emerge that could not have been anticipated at the outset.