Biography:
Soheila Zarrabi was born in Iran. She was raised in a non-traditional Iranian family, with her older siblings involved in politics and, Art especially cinematography.
Visual Arts for her was a natural inducement, Soheila’s love for Art grew tremendously, as she started painting, drawing and writing poems in her early childhood. At around 13 years of age, she started her academicals learning path in a private Arts school, and then she attended technical high school of Arts, during that school, she became acquainted with the style of realism and classical painting and completed them, with high drawing and painting skills and mastery in this style. It
was during this period that he became acquainted with photography and miniature painting, graphic, sculpture, and in her acquaintance with miniatures, she fell in love with its bright and shiny colors, but in terms of design and her brush effects, expressionist tendencies were always present, perhaps educated with a strong spirit, courage and childlikeness of her Soul in dealing with social hardships of women, war and religious atrocities in the Middle East.
this method repeatedly used in her student work, both colors and lines are screaming and metamorphosed, helpless people are seen in the bottleneck and social and psychological pressures.
She has used this pattern in her Thesis along with two live and expressive shows in which her brother was the Actor of these two happenings in her Thesis.
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After immigrating to Canada, she learned and worked as an animator and graphic designer and later building interior design, and during this time she incorporated house-building materials such as tiles to her work.
In her latest work, Stone collection she addresses the issue of violence against women. In these feminist Art works, she emphasizes women’s battle expression with her own body and feelings of confusion, asking are we blessed or not?!!.....issue of women’s identity and survivors are main concern in these pieces, after all of her own nightmares,’, and experiences in the Middle East, and other parts of the world. Series of women with broken bodies and/or hearts, being stoned, manifest themselves… “I am unlocking my body at the highest consequences”….?
In stone Collection she uses the symbolic colors of gray, silver, black, blue, and red reducing the selection of colors emphasizing the massage of “dark cultures against women’s desires”, silver is the dominant color for many reasoned, connection to the culture, old miniature painting, and her grandfather business of silver trade, gluing objects like locks and keys pieces of bloody fabrics, religious Shrine representing pain and suffering with wrong hope and solution.