Artist Statement
Farhad Nikfam (b. 1987) is an Iranian-azeri painter living & working in Baku, Azerbaijan. Raised at the crossroads of post-soviet, south Caucasian and Persian cultures yet influenced by a romanticized image of western world of the 90's and 2000’s, the artist discovers and explores new worlds, where all of these coexist.
Firstly, discovered and published in New American Paintings Magazine at the start of pandemic in 2020, Farhad Nikfam’s paintings depict the space where the artist managed to unite the objective reality and his fantasies - whether it be his own design of a beer bottle he would prefer to drink from or of an armchair he would like to sit on, or fanciful scenarios where the only portal for a mermaid to escape an apartment building could be a toilet bowl.
Numerous plots embedded in each of the recent paintings are united by a common form - a shelf in a mobile phone store, or a common facade of a building, or a bouquet, but are autonomous per se.
Inspired by the freedom of primitivism in works of Henri Rousseau, as well as by industrial design (his first field of studies), Farhad creates new forms of daily life - angular and naive at the same time. The eye-catching sharpness and directness of lines are combined with straightforward childlike perception, a love for bright colors, and non-ergonomic technology objects from the 90s. In his own words, the artist should live life to the fullest to tell his own story.
