Yasmin Shaghayegh Noorbakhsh is a Persian-British, London-based artist. She works across painting, sculpture, and installation. Her practice is inspired by the unclear, subjective, and often distorted way that events are percieved or remembered by individuals and society over time and how it signifies that our understanding of the past is not a precise recording, but rather a blend of verifiable facts (history) and selective, emotional, or faded recollections (memory). Nourbakhsh’s works are not isolated objects but situational configurations: each generates a situation—a perception, a memory, a narrative. By using artefacts and cultural motifs she examines how their origin and complexity can dissolve when viewed through a particular construct or agenda. These cultural and historical signifiers appear throughout her work and merge with contemporary elements to create deliberate frictions and collisions.
Her work demonstrates a range of experimentation with materials and processes, including erasure, masking, stencilling, and layered application of paint and quartz sand. This acts to materialise concerns around memory and cultural displacement. Erasure in Nourbakhsh´s practice is not merely a formalistic gesture; it is not merely folding a surface for beauty, but rather revealing the politics of concealment. Erasure in her work is both an aesthetic and epistemic strategy: by removing parts of a pattern, covering sections of an image, she raises the question: What is seen? What is erased? Who decides? These questions mark the point where the critique of representation begins.
As a female artist within the Iranian diaspora, Noorbakhsh’s work is deeply connected to hybrid identity, the uncertainty it generates, and the stories and memories that inhabit a “third space”, the in-between realm where cultures, experiences, and narratives intersect. Geometry and grids in her work function as tools for understanding her surroundings and creating rational structures; however, these structures are sometimes imperfect. Containers and grids fail, losing their ability to confine or protect. Geometry becomes a form that leaks, suggesting that completeness is never fixed but instead a subjective, shifting, and layered experience, shaped by memory, narrative, and cultural negotiation.
Her recent series of work and research is focused on Persian carpets. The carpet serves as a spatial metaphor that weaves the themes of memory, refuge, and order. It is the portable ground of the home; a soft geography on which we sit, sleep, and narrate; fragmented, layered, with margins and gaps. In her paintings she tries to remove the scene from mere decoration, turning it into a site of inquiry aiming for the work to be a place of contemplation and inspiration.
Yasmin graduated in 2022 from City & Guilds of London Art school with a distinction for her MA in Fine art and was the recipient of the outstanding critical engagement prize 2022. She has been shortlisted for different prizes such as Combat ArtPrize 2024 at Giovani Fattori museum Italy and Zabludowicz CollectionMother Art prize 2022. Yasmin has been selected finalist for different collective shows such as Human Perspective 2021 at Cambridge University, ReA Art Fair Milan 2022, Sumac Space Berlin 2025 and Biennale Internazionale Donna 2026. She was the co-curator and exhibiting artist for a group project/residency called ‘Corpus’ in collaboration with Hypha Studios in London July 2023. She is currently pursuing an MA in painting at the Royal College of Arts London.
Education
MA Painting , Royal College of Art, 2026
MA Fine art, City and Guilds of London Art School, 2020-2022
BA Hons Interior Design; Kingston University, London, 2012
Shortlisted/prizes
Sumac Space short list artist, Berlin ,2025
Combat Art Prize finalist, Fattori Museum, Livorno, Italy, 2024
ReA Art Fair Milan, selected Artist, 2023
Mother Art Prize finalist, Zabludowicz Collection, 2022
City & Guilds Outstanding critical engagement prize, 2022
Human perspective, Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge, 2021
Selected Exhibitions
‘The tides we share’ Barbican library, Barbican centre, London, 8-27Jan 2026
‘‘Act of Conflations’ Sumac Space, Berlin, 13-27 Sep 2025
‘Beyond the prize’ Mall galleries, London 16-26 April 2025
‘Combat Art Prize’, Fattori Museum, Livorno, Italy, Sep-Oct 2024
‘The Universe within’ Copeland gallery, Peckham, London 19-22 Sep 2024
‘Dump 01’, Greatorex Street Gallery, London, 24-29 Oct 2023
‘Bath Open Art Prize’, 44AD Artspace, Bath, 12-28 Oct 2023
‘ReA Milan 2023’ , Milan, 12- 15 Oct 2023
‘Crawl Space’, Crypt Gallery, London, 29-30 Sep 2023
‘The Anxiety Of Interdisciplinarity 2.0’, ARB , University of Cambridge, 25 Sep- 17 Nov 2023
7 Artist 7 Stratton, London Mayfair, 15thJune-7th July 2023
Corpus, Hypha Farringdon, London, 16June- 16th July 2023
Mother Art Prize, Zabludowicz Collection, London, 30March-25June 2023
Inspirational Women artists, God’s House Tower, Sothampton, 10th March-23rd April 2023
‘Artworks Open’, Bagtrust, London 3-11th Dec 2022
‘Brixton Art Prize’, DnBrixton, London, July 2022
‘Human Perspective’, University of Cambridge, October 2021
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