In Arghavan Khosravi’s surreal, three-dimensional paintings, nothing is what it seems. Creased book spines prove to be meticulously sculpted and painted canvases. A dark nook in a castle fortress reveals a female figure peeking out from a doorway. Glowing light turns out to be a fiery bullet. “I like to have these moments where some part of the work is not shouting,” Khosravi told me in her home studio in Connecticut. “The more time you spend, the more details reveal themselves.”
The artist’s exquisite craftsmanship keeps her work mysterious and open-ended, despite her heavy, explicit themes. Her work addresses oppressive attitudes towards women in Iran, where Khosravi was born and lived before moving to the United States in 2015. The artist devotes much of her practice to crafting illusions, figuring out how to attach various panels and make wood or canvas resemble metal, fabric, or stone. “I like contradiction, contrasting elements, duality,” she said. “There’s barbed wire, but the colors are peaceful. A figure seems calm, but her hands are bound. I hope violence isn’t the first thing you see.”
This month, Khosravi debuts a new body of work based on the form of the altarpiece, with many of the paintings featuring compartments, doors, and a curtain that partially obscure what’s just beyond. After making larger, more monumental pieces, the artist said she “wanted to take a break and explore more intimate spaces.” Khosravi created these pared-down pieces before U.S. tensions with Iran exploded into warfare and has been “thinking more and more about personal, psychological space and the emotional residue of being born and raised under those circumstances in Iran.”
The new altarpiece works, along with some larger-scale pieces, will be on view in “What Remains” at Uffner & Liu, which will run through July 2nd. Khosravi will also be featured in the forthcoming decennial at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut (June 7, 2026 to January 10, 2027), which celebrates artists working across the state.
One of Khosravi’s works at Uffner & Liu, Behind a Curtain (all works 2026), features a bullet that passes through a mirror, its golden tail echoing light that shines from a shirt pocket. “I had this image of rockets or bombs, not literally, but as symbols of disruption [or] instability,” the artist said. “I was born during the Iran-Iraq War, and growing up, the possibility of conflict always felt like something lingering in the background. That shadow leaves an emotional and psychological imprint.”
Yet Khosravi’s source materials far precede contemporary warfare. “I look at a lot of Persian miniature paintings,” she said. “Women are often absent or given a secondary role. I’m interested in… shifting those dynamics.” Medieval illustrations also inform the work: Home recreates iconography of Christ’s side wound that looks distinctly vaginal. Greek and Roman sculptures inspire the cracking, classical visage in The Listener, a shift from the youthful feminine beauty across much of the work. “I like the juxtaposition of objects or scenes that come from different contexts,” the artist said. “They create dialogue. And the sculptures show idealized human bodies, but over time, they’re broken or eroded. My objects embody that contrast.”
The artist’s own story is one of contrast and cross-cultural concern. She moved to the United States in 2015 to attend an MFA program for painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. She lived around the northeastern U.S., and, a few years ago, relocated to Connecticut. While female figures, flowers, and weapons have long been central to Khosravi’s visual lexicon, her ideas have shifted as conditions in Iran have changed. The country’s Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom) movement, which followed the 2022 murder of Mahsa Amini, a young woman in Tehran who was arrested for not wearing a hijab, galvanized the artist. Her subsequent 2023–24 exhibition at Uffner & Liu, “True to Self,” featured a series of freestanding female warriors.
“More and more, I see women refusing to accept imposed limitations,” Khosravi said. “Women are trying to push back.” Her female figures never wear the headcoverings; when she appropriates from miniature paintings, she removes them.
There’s still a long way to go, for women in both the Middle East and in the United States. “It’s as if everything is built against women. And women can try to change that,” the artist said.
This notion is echoed in The Drop, one of the smaller works in the Uffner & Liu show. Two side panels depict women who cover their faces with one hand, the other trapped in wooden stocks. The central panel resembles a guillotine in front of a pomegranate tree: a symbol of life, fertility, and prosperity.
“If you are living under very harsh circumstances, in Iran or other countries, life goes on and there are beautiful moments,” Khosravi said. “The way to survive is to hold onto that hope.” It may not be the first thing her viewers see, but gradually, “it reveals itself.”
