Shohreh Mehran, a contemporary painter, was born in Ardabil. She is the most prominent student of the generation of figurative artists trained in the Aghdashloo workshop in the 80s, and the use of photographs was prevalent in many of their works. This prolific artist has continuously held exhibitions in Iran and abroad every two years since the 80s. The first group show of her works was at the Goethe Institute in Tehran in 1985. In 1987, her paintings were shown in another group exhibition at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts. Shohreh Mehran's first solo exhibition was at the Golestan Gallery at the beginning of the 1990s, and in cooperation with this gallery, she had three more solo exhibitions in the following years. In 1999, her paintings appeared in a group exhibition in New York. During her professional activities, she has participated in numerous group exhibitions in England, the United States, Germany, UAE, etc.
Shohreh Mehran's paintings can be considered an attempt to create quasi-referential images of Tehran's atmosphere and the social life of the urban middle class, and women have a prominent presence in most periods of her painting career. Women are depicted in formal and school uniforms and other public arenas. Arrangements such as covering the faces of these women by using a painting frame, a part of the clothes, or overlapping the organs, make the women in these paintings change from a person to a generalizable models of an urban-middle-class women in Iranian society. For this reason, these paintings have a critical tone and intensify the social processes in the de-identification of women and their transition from subject to an object which is in accordance with the reading of official institutions of female identity. On the other hand, her subtle emphasis on the female body and gestures, and maintaining a hint of eroticism and female sexual power that reveals itself behind the veil, create cracks in this hard shell. Mehran uses photographs in drawing her pictures. She sees this beginning in the inner necessity of her subjects, which is gradually recognized as a characteristic of her work: "In the beginning, I only took pictures out of necessity; Only because my subjects were not things that I could paint on the spot. And then, I tried to make interventions in work, however artificial, so that it wouldn't be said that she copied the photo, but now I don't have this concern anymore. My technique is realistic. I don't rely on my imagination and can't work imaginatively. Therefore, I must have what I am painting in front of me. I don't even mind if my painting is like a photo."