My work sits primarily in figurative painting, built mainly through oil and gouache, with mixed-media and collage elements when a piece calls for more texture or history in its surface. I trained as a nurse before returning to painting more seriously in 2019, studying under professional instructors and working through different approaches until oil became the medium that let me find my own hand.
Technically, I move between tightly rendered figures and looser, more gestural brushwork depending on what a series needs. In The Echoes Beneath the Rubble, I paint over earlier drawings so fragments of the original remain visible beneath new layers — memory surfacing through paint rather than being erased by it. Rage in Silence is a set of self-portraits responding to violence in Iran, where the figure carries the psychological weight rather than depicting the event itself. Other bodies of work, like Figures and Their Spaces, use a freer gouache line to work through guilt and body shame, while quieter still-life pieces sit alongside these as a counterpoint.
For me, figuration is a way of making the internal visible — technique in service of feeling, not the other way around.
Biography
My name is Anahita Ejtehadi. Born in Tehran in 1992, my path to a full-time art practice took an unexpected route through the medical field. I originally earned a nursing degree in Kuala Lumpur in 2016 and began my career in healthcare. However, painting had been a serious passion since my teenage years, and the pull toward a creative life eventually became too strong to resist. I made the decision to pivot and commit fully to art.
Since 2019, I’ve dedicated myself to developing my technique through professional instruction and extensive experimentation. Recently, a deep dive into oil painting has been pivotal for me, helping to establish my distinct visual language.