Zahra Akbari Baseri was born in Iran in 1988. In 2012, she earned a BA in carpet design from Yazd University, Iran. At the age of 22, she immigrated to London and soon came to artistic prominence when her work was selected for the BP Portrait Award held at the National Portrait Gallery in 2013. Her art practice includes traditional mediums and the NFT space.
Contemporary artist and figurative painter, Zahra Akbari Baseri was born in Iran in 1988. In 2012, she earned a BA in carpet design from Yazd University, Iran. At the age of 22, she immigrated to London and within a year of her arrival, she had come to prominence as an artist when her work was selected for the annual BP Portrait Prize (2013) held at the National Portrait Gallery. Regarding the impact of her arrival, she has stated: ‘I had just migrated to England and had a lot of different emotions about it.’ (ISEULT, 2022).
Her work straddles hand-drawn traditional painting and the NFT space, with the two often combined when the physical medium is scanned and turned into a digital piece. She works with acrylic, colour pencil, mechanical pencil, and watercolour on paper or canvas. As a child, she initially aspired to study medicine. Speaking of her introduction to art, she has shared, ‘It was very weird for me. I think that when I was 10 or 12 years old, I painted something for my school and my teacher was impressed by it. They talked to my dad about me becoming an artist. He started to send me to different classes, so it was not a choice for me.’ (ISEULT, 2022).
She often paints portraits, frequently of people she knows. Her work which often resembles traditional botanical drawings or portraits, is reminiscent of neoclassical studies, with a colour scheme at times suggesting a blend between Lucian Freud and Egon Schiele. Her paintings and drawings frequently feature flowers and/or hands. Commenting on moving into the NFT realm, she has observed: ‘Once I got into the ecosystem, I resonated with the vibe more than any other space. Once I saw I could be part of the growth and what I wanted to stand for, I decided to start minting my work in $ASH.’ (TEEJ_0_O, 2022). Her favourite digital artist is the crypto NFT artist known as Pak — whose work she collects — particularly his Lost Poets collection. Indeed, researching his work led her to viewing NFTs not merely as a way to make money but as a unique form of expression. In the physical art realm, she cites Rembrandt as an influence, particularly admiring his iconic painting Self-Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar (1659). She also appreciates the Spanish realist painter, Antonio López García.
Since 2021, Baseri has released NFTs on platforms such as Foundation and KnownOrigin. She is a member of the #ASHCreators community, enthusiasts of the ERC20 token (an implemented standard for fungible, or mutable interchangeable, tokens) ‘$ASH’ or ‘#ASH’, created by Pak. Other notable figures who have collaborated on $ASH include American influencer, Paris Hilton and the Russian feminist and performance art group, Pussy Riot. Baseri debuted her $ASH collection titled Resurrection of Life in 2021, exploring the ‘fine line between dead ashes and the mass coronation of life’ (TEEJ_0_O, 2022). In 2022, her work Congregation was initially sold multiple times as a digital piece before its physical version became available for sale.
In 2020, Baseri received the Patsy Whiting Award from The Society of Women Artists. The following year, she won the annual Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize (open to all UK-based artists and makers) for her intimate portrait titled Sara, posed for by a close friend of Baseri’s. Initially working from photographs, Baseri later sketched Sara during short sittings, drawn her approximately ten times before this particular piece. Zahra Akbari Baseri currently lives and works London, England. In the UK public domain her portrait of another friend Ali, titled Power of Moment (2013) — whom she befriended in 2011 and later painted in his Glasgow flat —is held in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.