"Living between two cultures (American – Persian), I find myself in constant translation. Culture is so much more than language. It is a shared visual sensibility, humor, music, rituals, past times, food, spiritual commonalities, shared history and understanding. I draw inspiration for my art from all of this and from the limitations inherent in language. I search for the universal abstractions of lines, curves, dots that are the building blocks of the symbols that make any language and that help to describe a culture.
The absurdity and brutality of our world, drives me to find the underlying beauty in the abstraction of language and to explore the possibility of using universal marks to create art that bridges cultures, nationalities, or ethnicities – art that uncovers the commonalities we all share and respect –a reverence for life, time and peace. I use these universal marks in repetition to apply dual meaning to the symbols: one text and language and the other artistic and symbolic. My work has become quiet in its nature, devoid of blatant color and created using a repetitive and meditative process. The effect of which invites the viewer to meditate upon the marks themselves and their own place on the bridge of our shared human experience."
Nina Ghanbarzadeh is a visual artist emigrated from Tehran, Iran in 2001. She earned
her BFA with a double major in painting, drawing and graphic design from the
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in 2013 and completed a two-year AIR Program
with Redline Milwaukee in 2015. Nina is a 2024 Mary L. Nohl Fellow in the Established
Artist Category, the winner of best in the show in Wisconsin Biennial 2020 and received
the Fredric R. Layton Foundations Scholarship. She is also a teaching artist and has
been involved in many workshops, lectures, presentations, and critiques.
Recent focus in her work has been the intersection of text and image and the potential
of using text to create movement and texture.
Visit www.ninaghanbarzadeh.com to learn more about this amazing artist, and come see her work in person May 16 - June 27, 2025!