Detail of Maryam Hoseini, Secrets Between Her and Her Shadow 4, 2019. Photo by Jeffrey Sturges
Maryam Hoseini investigates fragmentation, spatial disruption, and architectures of intimacy shaped by displacement and rupture. Through painting, drawing, and multi-panel installations, they construct liminal worlds in which bodies move fluidly between legibility and disappearance. Working with porous surfaces and deliberate marks, Hoseini embraces sensuous excess as a mode of rebellion. Bodies at once gendered and ungendered enact gestures of violence as well as tenderness, floating in and out of legibility.
Rooted in diasporic experience and informed by social and political conditions, Hoseini’s practice navigates abstraction and figuration, repetition and erasure. Across their work, figuration dissolves into pattern, symmetry, and recurrence. Their compositions resist linear narrative, unfolding as temporal topographies in which memory, form, and perception remain in flux.
Detail of Maryam Hoseini, Secrets Between Her and Her Shadow 1, 2019. Photo by Jeffrey Sturges
Maryam Hoseini (born 1988, Tehran, Iran) received their MFA degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Bard College, NY, USA both in 2016.
Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: Swells, Green Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2025); Arrowslit, High Art, Paris (2022); After You, Green Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2020); Yes Sky, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY (2020); Body Armor, MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2018); and Of Strangers and Parrots, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY (2017).
Recent group exhibitions include: Once Within a Time: 12th International, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM (2025); Fluid Systems, carlier | gebauer, Berlin, Germany (2025); Histories of Ecology, MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil (2025); LGBTQIA+ Histories, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil (2024); Healing Ruins, Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, Istanbul (2023); 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2022); This End the Sun, New Museum, New York, NY (2021); A Space For Monsters, Philadelphia, PA (2021); Fables of Resurrection, Deborah Schamoni, Munich, Germany (2020); Open Call, The Shed, New York, NY (2019); Heartbreak, Ruya Maps, Venice, Italy (2019); Notebook, 56 Henry, New York, NY (2019); Sedentary Fragmentation, Heaven Gallery, Chicago, IL (2017); Echo, Gallery Kayafas, Boston, MA (2017); Night at the Museum, MOMA PS1, New York, NY (2016); Luminarts Cultural Foundation, the Union League Club of Chicago, IL (2016) among others.
They live and work in New York.
With roots in the Middle East and North Africa, these artists offer urgent perspectives on life in a rapidly evolving region.
Pramodha Weerasekera reflects on Hoseini’s practice, exploring embodiment, space, and the shifting boundaries between interior and exterior worlds.
Experimenting with various deconstructions of the body in paintings on wood and paper—ranging from anthropomorphic silhouettes to robotic forms—Iranian-born artist Maryam Hoseini has gained critical acclaim for their vivid abstractions of gender-oppressed, fragmented figures, rendered opaquely in restrictive architectural spaces.
The Iran-born, New York-based artist embraces desire as an act of liberation.
New generations of women painters are challenging centuries of art history with their nuanced, empathetic renderings of bare-chested bodies.
Ever inventive and questioning, Maryam Hoseini does battle with her tools, materials and the wider environment.
The 15th edition of Art Dubai (11–13 March 2022) includes over 100 galleries from 40 countries. Ocula Magazine reports from the ground to bring you highlights from this year's Contemporary, Modern, and Digital sectors.
The exhibition Open Call, opening May 30 and continuing through the summer and into the 2020 season, features 52 emerging artists and collectives based in New York City.
Excerpt from the essay Embodying the Miniature by Murtaza Vali, published in We Contain Multitudes by Galerie Isa, Mumbai.
Cultured Magazine has chosen Maryam Hoseini as one of the 30 Artists Under 35 to watch in 2019!
Maryam Hoseini speaks to Katrina Kufer about learning from the past to address the future, and the shifting definition of 'ruins' in a practice that intentionally remains open ended.
Maryam Hoseini's first solo exhibition Of Strangers and Parrots in Artforum Critic's Picks by Kat Herriman.
Maryam Hoseini's Of Strangers and Parrots picked as one of Emily Gallagher highlights in CULTURED for the month of November 2017.
