About

marmar is the studio of Maryam Moghaddam, a contemporary painter of women — their strength, endurance, and interior lives.

Working in oil and mixed media, in a language that moves between figuration and abstraction, she paints women who refuse to disappear: goddesses, commanders, dancers, mourners — women of myth and women of now. A body begins as a body and ends as weather — hair becoming wind, a shoulder becoming water, an arm opening into birds. The paintings speak of resilience, transformation, grief, healing, and the longing for freedom — and they resolve into something a viewer recognises before they can name it.

In her own words

"I paint women. Women from ancient stories and women of this moment — women whose strength is quiet but will not be denied. I build my surfaces in layers: ridges of paint, gold that burns through, colour buried and recovered — because that is how a woman's strength is made too, layer over layer, loss under light. If a woman stands before one of my paintings and feels her own courage named, the work has done what I made it for."

Materials

Works are built in layers: oil and mixed media on canvas, with relief texture and metallic leaf that catch and hold light. Surface matters here — much of what these paintings do happens in the way light moves across them, which is why they reward being seen in person. A photograph flattens gold leaf into a beige rectangle; in raking light, it burns.

Training

Her formal training came in Florence, Italy — fine art studies in the city where painting and sculpture refuse to be separated, much of it spent drawing from the great stone casts, learning form the slow way: by looking longer. Florence left two permanent marks on the work. The first is the discipline of the figure. The second is the tondo — the circular format the Renaissance reserved for what it revered. It keeps returning in these paintings, and there is no reason to reserve it for saints.

Exhibitions

  • 2025 — Restructuring the Future, China International Art Exhibition, Toronto, Canada
  • 2023 — Sun and Moon, solo exhibition, Gamla Filmstaden, Stockholm, Sweden
  • 2022 — Reborn, LdM Gallery, Lorenzo de' Medici Institute, Florence, Italy
  • 2019 — World of Colors, solo exhibition, La Casa degli Italiani, Gothenburg, Sweden
  • 2016 — Soul, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden

Teaching

Alongside the studio practice, marmar teaches painting workshops — because the second-best thing to making a painting is watching someone realise they can.

Enquiries

Original paintings ship worldwide, fully insured — from Newmarket, Ontario, or from the Sweden studio where noted on a work's page. Every painting is an original: signed, one of a kind, and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.