Artist Spotlight: Mahsa Karimi and the Power of Visual Storytelling
Mahsa Karimi’s art is not just an act of expression, it’s an excavation of memory, pain, resilience, and love. As both a painter and sculptor, Karimi invites the viewer into a world where the personal and political collapse into one another. Her self-portraits are not born of vanity, but of lived experience: mirrors of her own body, often filtered through her sister's presence, a recurring figure in her work who lives with neurological and physical disabilities. In these layered faces, Karimi examines grief, tenderness, identity, and the fragile line between the self and the other.
Her work is marked by a bold use of Persian script, numbers, and symbols each bearing a deeply personal, often painful meaning. One symbol that appears frequently is the Persian “وَ” (“and”), which for Karimi represents stories that never find closure: headlines that keep repeating, griefs that linger, and histories that bleed into the present.
Having transitioned from illustration to expressive painting and then to ceramic sculpture, Karimi’s practice is built on transformation. Her paintings are emotionally raw, often reflecting personal and collective traumas, while her sculptures bring those same figures into physical space tactile, fragile, enduring. For her, the two media are not separate paths, but two arms of the same narrative body.
Karimi’s influences range from Ardeshir Mohasses and Bahman Mohasses to Chagall and Francis Bacon. Her style is an organic hybrid of expressionism, surrealism, and conceptual figuration that is unmistakably her own. Her exhibitions in the Middle East and an artist residency in India have all shaped the storytelling core of her practice.
In one unforgettable moment, a close friend interpreted a detail in one of her self-portraits that unconsciously echoed the gestures of her sister, a realization that revealed the depth of emotional memory embedded in her art.
Currently, Karimi is developing a new body of work that blends ceramic trees, birds, and human forms to narrate a metaphorical bond with her homeland, scarred, bare, but unyielding. Her art continues to evolve, but always with the same pulse: to tell the truths that live in silence, in fragments, and in the faces we know best our own.
💡 At Sanbuk.Art, we are proud to spotlight artists like Mahsa Karimi who turn personal stories into powerful visual testimony. Her art reminds us that vulnerability can be a form of resistance, and that every line, every form, carries a voice worth hearing.
