Maryam Amiryani

Maryam Amiryani is an Iranian-American painter and still-life artist. Her sparse and individualistic still-life paintings often focus on one or two carefully chosen and often idiosyncratic objects, displayed against a solid background. Her innovative dialogue between positive and negative space creates startling portraits featuring everything from opium pipes and discarded t-shirts, to plastic zebras and paper cranes. Her work focuses on how the accumulation of seemingly meaningless objects throughout one’s lifetime preserves specific memories and feeling eternally.

Amiryani was born in Shiraz, Iran in 1967. She immigrated with her family to Paris in 1978, and currently lives in Marfa, Texas, and her most recent show, “Discreet Depravities” opened at the Marfa Book Company.

The Lannan Foundation recently acquired one of Amiryani’s painting “Book Cover 4 (Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace.) The piece currently hangs in a Lannan Marfa Residency house once occupied by Foster Wallace himself during his residency there in 2000.