Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai, and New York would have a solo booth of works by Soraya Sharghi at the MENART Fair in Paris (May 27 – 30). Cornette de Saint Cyr, 6 av Hoche, 75008 Paris, is the location. The first international contemporary and modern art fair devoted to painters from the Middle East and North Africa is MENART Fair.

Sharghi is a New York-based Iranian artist who works in a variety of mediums, including painting and sculpture. Her goal is to portray new myths and storylines centering around power, drawing on an old mythology and Persian customs. She doesn't regard her method as duplicating the landscape of these stories, but rather as reshaping them to fit her goal, resulting in remarkable or supernatural individuals.

Sharghi creates 21st-century mythology in her large-format paintings. Young women are considered for the role of a new sort of heroine, with inspiration derived from the visual worlds of old Europe and eastern stories. Traditional masculine iconography undergoes re-figuration through the feminine body. Old heroes are replaced by new subjects as the new women remake history. They surpass their environment and dominate their world in unison with flora and fauna.

The paintings' themes and detailed friezes are inspired by Sharghi's childhood fairy tales, which she converts into her global language. Portrayals of Persian miniature art, and Japanese anime, and modern literature, are important sources of inspiration for her. Sharghi has created a highly accurate and timely painting method that she blends with screen printing, gold leaf, plastic materials on canvas, and ‘Khtam,' the traditional Persian inlay method.

She works throughout history and myth, linking them with her particular imagined universe, and produces new stories using her new characters, all while striving for a global language that stimulates discussions across many social and political situations. As a Persian artist, her culture is central to her work; she proudly expresses her love of Iranian poetry, particularly the major epic poems comparable to Homer's The Iliad or Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy.

However, poetry is infinitely more important in Iran than it does in the West since it recounts history, such as The Shahnameh or The Book of Kings, which describes the birth of the world and the development of Persian civilization. For Sharghi, such epic works serve as creative fuel: poetry, and besides, cannot depict what all these fabled individuals would have looked like all those years ago.

“In my paintings, I'm not portraying mythology; I'm using inspirations like the most renowned Persian poetry, the Shahnameh, to establish a backdrop for the war that goes on inside,” she adds. Nevertheless, the primary figure is her, who travels through several works in many shapes, establishing new mythology. The observer will come across feminine idols that are unafraid of their femininity, unrestricted in their color, and enormous in scale. They are strong beings who have now been put in Technicolor settings.

Her characters are placed gently in the center of the composition, yet are not overshadowed by their vibrant, intricate backgrounds. Danna Lorch, an art critic, said that her canvases are "happening areas." “In fact,” Lorch argues, “boredom appears to be Sharghi's greatest concern as an artist.” “In the studio, she hustles like an athletic athlete, resisting plateauing whenever something works perfectly and might easily be reproduced to the joy of collectors. Rather, she challenges herself using new approaches, which, as a millennial painter, she often documents in short films on her Instagram channel.”

“The colors are vibrant and audaciously combined,” writes Alessandra Migliorini for ARTE.it, Bulgari Hotel Dubai. Her influences range from Iranian poems to Pop Art, mythological to comic books, philosophies to Japanese art, notably the creations of Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami.” “I don't limit the color in my work,” Sharghi explains, revealing that she frequently adds hues as she paints instead of just coming at the canvas with a formal paint by number strategy.

She emphasizes the amount to which we live with mythology even now through her art. However, it is not necessary to be Persian to comprehend it. Sharghi earned a BFA in painting from Soore Art University in Tehran and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in California. (After graduating, she began teaching at SFAI public schools.) In Painting and Sculpture, she gave studio lessons on personal mythology. She has earned various grants and residencies, which included an MFA Fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute, the Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, and the Headlands Center for the Arts' Graduate Fellowship Alternate Award.

In Pennsylvania, residencies include The Post Contemporary and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and the New Hope Colony Artist Residency, and the Phillips Mill Association for the Arts. Her work has been exhibited locally and internationally, along with the CICA Contemporary Museum (Czong Institute for Contemporary Art) in South Korea, the Today Art Museum in China, the MOAH Museum in Los Angeles, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, the Andrea Schwartz Gallery and SOMArts in San Francisco, the Aaran Gallery, Mah Gallery, and the Fajr International Film Festival in Tehran, Iran, the Setareh Gallery in Düsseldorf, and the Geffen Contemporary in New York.