Farima Fooladi was born in Tehran, Iran, in a transition period from monarchy to the Islamic republic and theocracy. She lives in Houston, TX. Recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for 2023- 2024, Fooladi is fascinated by the lasting impact of collective trauma caused by invasion, migration, and displacement on our day-to-day experiences. The transformation of civic spaces caused by social and political changes particularly interests her.
Fooladi’s paintings depict spaces using memory, compressing architecture and landscape from her upbringing in post-revolutionary Iran with those surrounding her as an adult after emigrating to the United States. In her newest work, she combines details from southern Iran’s arid environment with luscious flora and other specifics of her current home in Houston. The resulting paintings present organic and surreal landscapes that capture the transition of a place between feeling familiar and deeply foreign. Recent work has been published in New American Paintings, No 162. Fooladi was nominated and became an artist-in-residence in the fourth iteration of Artists on Site at the Asia Society, Houston, in 2023.
At MacDowell, Fooladi worked on a series of paintings for her 2025 solo show at Lawndale Art Center in Houston. In a press release for SmackMellon, Rachel Vera Steinberg wrote, "Fooladi's paintings present organic and surreal landscapes that capture the transition of a place between feeling familiar and deeply foreign. These paintings propose a progression of time when one can be confident that more memories will accrue and, therefore, increase the spatial depth. As Fooladi's frames continue to expand, the world becomes bigger, more chaotic, and more nuanced through the palimpsests left within the edifice of her memory."
Portrait by Azin Terani
