Ila Firouzabadi

Born in 1980 in Tehran and based in Montreal since 2012, Ila Firouzabadi is an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on ambiguous and sensitive forms, aiming to depict threatening, or at times threatened, worlds that refer to the tensions and conflicts inherent in present society through drawings and a combination sculpture and installation.

Her sculptures often meet an object, such as a table, a bathtub or an aquarium, that foils the traditional presentation of works and creates a dialogue between the raw and sophisticated appearance. The representation of unstructured bodies, deformed faces or animal elements, such as a beak, causes an endless oscillation between the figure of the human and its dehumanization. Mixing violence and intimacy, inspired by facts and stories that remain invisible, Ila Firouzabadi brings into play the universal divisions of man in touch with the forces of destruction and survival, without submitting to a mere sensationalist staging of suffering, and creates hybrid works conceived as precarious balances in the throes of a possible changeover. These works, therefore, carry with them vigorous emotions from which emerges a painful but uncompromising poetry.

Firouzabadi received a BA in graphic design in 2005 from Azad University of Art and Architecture in Tehran and graduated from Ecole National des arts decoratifes of Strasbourg in 2009.

She has exhibited her work around the world, notably at Keramikmuseum and the Artforum Kunstlerkreis Ortenau Gallery (Germany,2009), the Espace Apollonia (France, 2010), at the Theodore Deck museum (France, 2010), at OBORO (Quebec,2013), at MAI (Quebec,2015) and at Etemad gallery (Iran,2016), She also did a residency in Brussels ( Servais family collection) in 2018.