Azadeh Gholizadeh is an Iranian-born, Seattle-based artist whose work explores the shifting relationship between landscape, memory, and belonging. Trained as an architect in Tehran before earning her MFA in Chicago, Azadeh approaches tapestry, drawing, sculpture, and installation through a spatial logic shaped by structure, rhythm, and point of view. Her pixelated compositions draw from observed and remembered environments, translating fragments of trees, clouds, birds, and shifting light into geometric systems that hold the instability of place.
Azadeh’s practice is grounded in the slow, repetitive labor of stitching. Through this process, the image is not simply represented but rebuilt, one unit at a time. Her work often begins with a moment of attention: the outline of a solitary tree, the movement of a Great Blue Heron, or the atmosphere of a changing sky. These fragments are abstracted through pattern and grid, becoming meditations on how memory preserves, alters, and sometimes obscures what has been lost.
Informed by her experience of exile, Gholizadeh’s work understands home as a fragile and shifting condition rather than a stable location. Her recent installations expand this inquiry into immersive environments, combining tapestry, sculpture, wallpaper, and augmented reality to create spaces that ask viewers to move, look closely, and become aware of their own position in relation to the work. Through labor, abstraction, and layered materiality, Gholizadeh creates works that explore how belonging is reconstructed through attention, grief, and care.
Gholizadeh is a recipient of the Hopper Prize and a Chicago Artadia Awardee. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at The Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Elmhurst Art Museum, Illinois; and DePaul Art Museum, Chicago.
