Samira Alikhanzadeh is a contemporary Iranian painter. She is known for her paintings, which she uses to print old family photographs and mirror works on canvas.
Alikhanzadeh was one of Aydin Aghdashloo's students between 1986 and 1967. She then went to Al-Zahra University to study painting, and she went to Islamic Azad University for a master's degree and graduated in 1998 in painting. In the same year, she exhibited her artworks individually in the Golestan Gallery for the first time and continued collaborating with this gallery for ten years. Alikhanzadeh's first international appearance was in 2011 at the Contemporary Artfair in Munich, and a year later, she held her first solo exhibition abroad, entitled "Garden of Mirrors" at the Art Space Gallery in Dubai.
Alikhanzadeh participated in the 56th Venice Biennale in 20017 and the 58th in 2019. Since then, she has collaborated with the work gallery inside Iran.
Pakbaz writes about the artist's work style: "After a period of experience in semi-abstract painting, Alikhanzadeh turned to photo collages and paintings. Since the late 1991s, she has been printing pictures of people of the previous generation (women, men, children) on the board and covering most of their faces with mirrors so they would not be recognized. "But the mirror reflects the viewer's image and implicitly invites him to reflect on their identity." Her use of mirrors and how her pieces are cut is reminiscent of Monir Farmanfarmayian's method. The difference is that Alikhanzadeh places these mirrors in a limited way on the canvas.
She was one of the first artists to turn to old family photographs to create her paintings. Many of the painters of the next generation used the family photo album as their source. Alikhanzadeh, like all the artists of this scope, has a nostalgic and sad look at the past and uses color printing techniques to recreate discoloration and antiquity on the canvas.