Shahram Karimi - In The Garden

Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present 'In The Garden', an online solo show by artist Shahram Karimi (b. 1957, Iran) launching on August 15, 2025.

Shahram Karimi’s paintings are quiet carriers of time, unveiling a deeply lyrical body of work that draw from the fragrant soil of memory, and the layered beauty of Persian cultural heritage. Born in Shiraz, a city famed for its gardens, poetry, and philosophical spirit, Karimi’s practice is rooted in the sensory world of his childhood: the rustling of trees, the scent of blossoms, the laughter of family afternoons spent under flowering boughs. These gardens left an indelible imprint on his imagination, and today they reappear as vivid reminders of spaces filled with joy and reflection. Yet, threaded through his compositions are traces of a shifting Iran, which offer a glimpse of how the country’s complex transitions have affected its people. 

“Painting is my language,” Karimi admits, a means of expressing what cannot be spoken, a way of translating the world through feeling, symbol, and surface. Influenced by the intricacy of Persian miniature painting and German aesthetics, Karimi’s visual language is shaped by years spent between Iran, Germany, and New York. Absorbing the textures of each place while remaining rooted in his origins, his work exists between cultures and traditions, yet remains unmistakably personal. Faces and floral elements appear across the surface like fragments of lived experience. Some figures are imagined, others culled from passing glances in Tehran’s streets. While the works are not declaratively political, they quietly carry the emotional weight of a post-revolutionary Iran. Glimpses of people shaped by resilience, longing, and the complexity of cultural belonging. Karimi does not aim to tell their stories, but rather to hold space for their presence. The persistent presence of flowers in his work is more than aesthetic. It recalls the symbolic language offering a personal metaphor for transience and tenderness. Each bloom is a whisper of the past, each petal a note in a larger poem. As a poet himself, Karimi weaves words and images into parallel gestures, speaking to how beauty is everlasting through storytelling.

Working across mixed media on fabric, Karimi’s process is both intuitive and mindful. He carefully selects textiles from places like Uzbekistan, treating them not simply as surfaces, but as carriers of spirit. Each fabric is chosen not for its neutrality, but for its voice, its ability to absorb and translate the image, to hold memory in its weave. This online exhibition invites the viewer to the artist’s home, to the quiet, inner landscapes that endure when all else is in motion. It is a celebration of fragility and connection, a visual poem to the gardens that shaped Karimi’s earliest sense of beauty, and to those internal gardens we carry with us—tended by memory, watered by longing, and always in bloom.

For the Artist's CV please click here

Artist portrait, photo by Adel Mashoori