Azita Panahpour

Azita Panahpour deconstructs language to create a gestural vocabulary. In her ongoing series Shattered Poems, she transforms the Persian letterforms into abstraction, stripping them of their phonetic function and rebuilding on their aesthetic qualities. Guided by the curves, lines and points of letters, a new visual language is formed. 

Working primarily in steel and multilayered painted canvases, Panahpour draws from the Nasta’liq script, a Persian calligraphic script historically associated with poetry. She isolates a single letter, repeating, rotating and interlacing it until it results in a new visual language, driven by rhythm, scale and movement. Here, language shifts from something to be read to something to be felt. 

Her forms hold tension without resolving it. Suspended between movement and stillness, chaos and calm, they reflect an ongoing interest in transformation, imperfection and the shifting balance between control and chance. 

Panahpour began her career as an art director in New York City, where decades of working with typography and design shaped her sensitivity to the expressive potential of letterforms. She later carried that exploration into her fine art practice, expanding language from the graphic surface into painting and sculpture. Her work is held in private and institutional collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York and Dubai.