Sepideh Ilsley

Sepideh Ilsley is a Stockholm-based painter working in large-scale abstraction. Born in Shiraz, Iran, she came to Sweden as a child during the Iran–Iraq war. That rupture and the life built across two cultures, two visual languages, two ways of understanding form, is not a theme in her work so much as its underlying architecture.

Ilsley works across painting, sculpture, and digital works, three practices that inform and enrich each other, bound by a consistent preoccupation with form, volume, and surface. Her sensibility has been shaped by the monumental by the sculptural weight and volume of Henry Moore and Fernando Botero and it is this quality she carries into paint. The paintings are large, physically commanding, and demand to be encountered in person. They are not pictures of things. They are presences.

After years working as an art director, painting was a conscious turn toward the physical and the real a need to make something that existed in the world as an object, with weight and presence, resistant to the frictionless consumption of the digital. That urgency runs through the work and through the process. Each piece begins in the subconscious, developed through an extended process of digital drawing and reduction worked freely, without preconception, stripped back repeatedly until only the essential image remains, the point at which it compels her to paint it. She paints on the floor, working from all sides and angles, her body moving inside the space of the canvas itself. The resulting surfaces layered, physical, built up and resolved across extended time occupy a territory between painting and relief.

The work sits at a confluence of several live conversations in contemporary art: the place of the handmade in a digital world; the body of the painter as instrument and subject; the negotiation of cultural inheritance in a diasporic practice. For Ilsley, the Persian calligraphic tradition and Scandinavian minimalism are not opposing forces to be reconciled but two grammars she moves between fluidly, each informing the weight, rhythm, and spatial logic of the forms she builds. Her autobiographical and cultural inheritance is not illustrative but structural, felt in the tension between precision and instinct, in the push and pull of two visual languages meeting on a single surface.

Her work is held in notable private and public collections across Europe, the Gulf, Asia, and the Americas.

“My work is a pure expression of my being, my thoughts, ideas, feelings, memories, experiences, past and future. Where the process is as important to me as the finished piece, as well as the naming process. I go with where the painting and brush takes me. It is such a meditative state and once I immerse myself in my work I lose myself to it and let go.”