Memories often lack details, and what we remember best is how someone made us feel within a moment. Marjaneh Goudarzi's artistic practice centers on capturing the haziness of memory remembered experiences and people, and how they make up the fabric of personal identity. Her portrait paintings utilize bold colors to visually manifest the dichotomies of joy and sadness, hope and trauma, she discerns within her subjects.
Goudarzi first studied portrait painting in Shiraz, Iran, in the 1980s. Throughout her artistic career, change is the constant, seen in the increasing abstraction present in her portraits and figural studies. Her hazy painting technique expresses how memory is often unclear or biased. Her work often depicts influential people in her life, conflating both the sitter’s and Goudarzi's memories. Her
work considers the complex relationship between beauty and ugliness within both memory and art. The beautiful moments in life are often made ideal through this contrast. As an art historian, the depiction of beauty and ugliness in art history and how scholars have defined these terms informs her practice.
