Siamak Azmi is mainly known for his paintings of dolls. This contemporary painter was born in Kermanshah. His university education was in geology, and he started painting seriously in 1990. Two years later, he also taught painting. For the first time in 2001, he exhibited his works as a group at the Abbasi Hotel in Tehran. In the same year, in a project commissioned by the Isfahan Islamic Seminary Research Center, he painted 46 paintings based on Quranic parables displayed in 70 different cities in Iran. In this regard, he wrote scenarios for making animation. His first solo exhibition was held in Tehran's Abbasi Hotel in 2002. In 2006, he had a show at Hozeh Honari institute of Isfahan. His first international appearance was in a group exhibition in Turkmenistan in 2006. The following year, he participated in the 2006 China Expo. In 2009, his paintings were displayed in a solo exhibition in Venice, Italy. He has had numerous exhibitions in Iran, France, Turkey, England, Canada, and Qatar. His works are kept in prestigious art centers in these countries. In addition to painting, this artist has also had experience in video art.
Azmi has gone through different stages in his artistic process. In his early works, he painted pictures with representational and objectivist techniques, which had symbolic and poetic elements in terms of subject matter and logic of arrangement. In the 2000s, dolls' legs came into Azmi's paintings. He creates his famous paintings by arranging a pile of dolls on the ground. These large-scale paintings still follow a realistic approach. Objectivism, finishes, and volumes are derived from pre-modern painting methods. What makes these paintings new is not in his painting style but in his subjects. Determined symbolic mentalities appear in these works in a more calculated form. For example, in his painting "Deception," he places a wooden mannequin in the center of the frame, surrounded by a crowd of dolls. In other panels of this collection, by removing the title of the works, he leaves the way for the readability and various interpretations of the audience. As he admits in an interview, he is not interested in imposing a specific narrative and wants to maintain the different perceptions of his audience; he prefers that everyone encounters his paintings based on their imagination and mental backgrounds. The presence of plastic and colorful Walt Disney dolls in these frames is also reminiscent of American pop art.