Golnaz Fathi is a calligrapher, graphic artist, and one of the late inheritors of calligraphic painting.
Fathi was on the path of this art since she was a teenager due to her father's interest in calligraphy. At 13, she went to the calligraphers' association and studied calligraphy for three years under the supervision of Abdollah Farhadi. She graduated from the Islamic Azad University of Tehran in 1995 in the field of graphics, and in the same year, she won the award for the best Iranian female calligrapher in calligraphy. A year later, she received her calligraphy diploma from the Iranian Calligraphers Association. Until then, Fathi had taught painting in a self-taught manner. She finally chose the second way between classical calligraphy and painting. "I went to the association and said that I had chosen painting. The community wished me luck but said they would see the day I regretted it, and it would be too late. The professors treated me as if my decision was wrong, but there has never been a day for me to say that I was wrong." In 1996, she held the first exhibition of her paintings in the Seyhoun Gallery. In that collection, Fathi used her calligraphic experiences as free calligraphy. In the following experiments, she pushed the calligraphy more and more towards abstraction. Although Fathi's artworks were relatively successful in the domestic arena, after some time, she made her presence in domestic art less and less and focused on international art circles. With her intelligence and good knowledge of the rules of art fields, she found her place in the world art markets. Her artworks have been exhibited in Scandinavia, Australia, and many countries worldwide. Among these, we can mention her solo exhibition at the Trade Line Gallery in Dubai in 2013, the solo exhibition at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York in the same year, and her solo exhibition at the October Gallery in London in 2013. Some of her artworks are kept in prestigious centers of the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum, British Museum, Brighton Museum, Contemporary Art Museum of India, and Singapore Museum.
Red, Blue, and Yellow are among Fathi's popular color options. She often covers the background of her paintings with one of the primary colors and sometimes uses these colors in the form of limited strokes in the foreground of the painting. The lines of Fathi's calligraphy violate the classical aesthetics of calligraphy. Her words and letters are abstracted and flow in the form of a spiral and illegible abstract lines in the painting. Her free and carefree coloration and lines bring to mind the artworks of abstract expressionism and the paintings of artists such as Mark Tobey and Cy Twombly.