Sahba Ayati

Sahba Ayati (b. 1995) received her B.A. in Painting from the University of Art, Tehran, in 2017 and is currently pursuing an M.A. in Illustration at the University of Tehran. From an early age, she was drawn to art, filling countless sketchbooks with drawings inspired by her surroundings, from birds and trees to houses and people. She also enjoyed combining pieces of colored paper, fabric, and other materials with watercolor and wax crayons. In 2012, she earned her diploma in Graphic Design from the Tehran Girls’ School of Fine Arts. During her undergraduate studies, she primarily focused on portrait painting. In recent years, however, her attention has shifted toward flowers, plants, and garden landscapes, with watercolor becoming the primary medium of her practice. Through extensive experimentation with the wet-on-wet technique, she developed a distinctive visual language of her own. Her work explores the fragile boundary between reality and memory, and the fleeting, elusive nature of remembered moments. Using watercolor and colored inks on surfaces such as tracing paper, she seeks to evoke the dreamlike and transient quality of memory through transparent layers, delicate palettes, and gradually dissolving forms. Rather than serving as direct representations of reality, her paintings are echoes of what remains after images have faded into memory.