About Torabi

Visit artist page follow artist

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Reza Torabi does not paint scenes—he paints the life that converges within them. His work begins where movement can no longer be grasped: in those fleeting moments between encounter and dissolution, between the individual and the crowd.

Born in Iran and shaped by periods in Turkey and the United States, movement for Torabi is not a motif but the starting point of his thinking. His series Life in Motion emerges from this biographical dynamism—from an attempt to preserve the ephemeral nature of everyday life: cafés, street scenes, passing encounters that leave their trace in memory.

Yet what may begin as an urban snapshot gradually dissolves in the process of painting. Torabi works with fragments of collage—often sourced from magazines—which he transfers onto canvas and develops further through paint. Figures originate from found imagery, but they are not simply reproduced; they are reimagined painterly—especially in the rendering of bodies and clothing, which merge seamlessly and elegantly with the overall composition.

While large parts of the pictorial space are constructed freely, a dynamic interplay unfolds in which collage and painting become inseparably intertwined. Figures, architecture, and movement emerge through a constant negotiation between appropriation and transformation. Reality is not replicated but reassembled—condensed, shifted, and translated into a different rhythm.

Torabi’s worlds are not populated solely by anonymous passersby. Again and again, prominent figures appear—actors, musicians, artists, icons of the collective visual memory: James Bond actors, Madonna, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others. Yet even they do not appear as isolated stars; they are woven into a visual current in which public persona and everyday scene flow into one another. Fame is not displayed but integrated. Celebrity loses its exceptional status and becomes part of the quiet choreography that runs through Torabi’s work. In doing so, the perception of the famous shifts: it does not rise above life but enters directly into it.

At the core of his practice lies precisely this interplay. The precision of his draftsmanship—shaped by early portrait commissions and years of engagement with the human figure—meets an open, almost improvisational approach to composition. Detail and dissolution, control and movement are not opposites but forces that propel one another. This very combination allows for an unusual range: from precise portraits to urban scenes and more abstract pictorial structures, in which figure and space continually reorganize themselves. The result is a body of work in which figures seem to emerge from the crowd while remaining part of a larger whole.

Torabi himself describes this condition as a kind of “silent choreography” of everyday life—an invisible interplay of people, glances, and gestures that continually re-forms in each moment. It is precisely this quality that defines his work: it does not depict the event, but the flow in which it comes into being.

His paintings thus become spaces of condensation. They do not preserve what has been, but what is unfolding—and already slipping away in the next instant. A continuum of movement in which the individual and the collective overlap inseparably, where the fleeting is not held still but cast into form.

A painting that does not stand still, but continues—capturing life itself in transition.

VITA

Reza Torabi, born in 1980 in Tabriz, Iran, is an Iranian painter whose work explores the expressive potential of the human figure. He studied fine art in Iran and furthered his education at Güzel Sanatlar University, where he also engaged with art history, poetry, and Azerbaijani music. After early exhibition successes, his artistic path led him to Turkey in 2010, before relocating to the United States in 2012 through the United Nations’ Artistic Freedom Refugee Program. Today, Torabi lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.

Exhibitions

Group Exhibitions

2024	Affordable Art Fair NY, USA
	CONTEXT Art Miami, Miami, FL, USA
2023	Art Palm Beach, Palm Beach, FL, USA
	Art Wynwood, Miami, FL, USA
2022	LA Art Show, Los Angeles, CA, USA
	Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary, Palm Beach, FL, USA
	Hamptons Fine Art Fair, Southampton, NY, USA
	CONTEXT Art Miami, Miami, FL, USA
2021	Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary, Online Fair Affordable Art Fair, New York, NY, USA
	CONTEXT Art Miami, Miami, FL, USA
2020	Art Palm Springs, Palm Springs, CA , USA
	LA Art Show, Los Angeles, CA, USA
	Affordable Art Fair, NY
	Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary, Palm Beach, FL, USA
2019	CONTEXT Art Miami, Miami, FL, USA
	Affordable Art Fair NYC, New York, NY, USA
	Seattle Art Fair, Seattle, WA, USA
	“The Palm Beach Show: Jewelry, Art, Antiques, and Design”, Palm Beach, FL, USA
2018	Las Olas Art Fair, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, USA