In this episode, Johann König talks to Arghavan Khosravi, an Iranian-born, US-based artist whose layered, architecturally complex paintings are currently on display in THE SHAPE OF ABSENCE at KÖNIG GALERIE in Berlin.

Khosravi took an unusual route to becoming a painter: she was surrounded by her father's work in traditional Persian Islamic architecture as a child, then took a detour into graphic design and illustration before finally deciding to focus fully on painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. She reflects on what art school can and cannot teach and explains why, at its best, grad school helps an artist find their own voice rather than reproduce someone else's.

The conversation centres on Khosravi's distinctive visual language, which features shaped panels growing out of the wall, multi-layered surfaces combining wood, canvas, and plexiglass, and a symbolic vocabulary drawn from Persian miniature painting, Renaissance altarpieces, and coded imagery such as pomegranates, hands, cages, and hourglasses. She discusses the figures that appear throughout her work — women whose faces remain neutral, composed and deliberately unreadable — and explains why this absence of visible emotion is a form of power in itself.

The two also discuss what it meant to grow up amid the tension between private and public life in post-revolutionary Iran, how this experience of duality became the structural logic of her entire practice, and how the Woman Life Freedom movement connected to work she had been creating long before the world was watching.

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Photo by Hossein Fatemi © Courtesy of the artist