Tag: Shirin Towfiq

Shirin Towfiq (b. 1994, Stockholm, Sweden; lives and works in London) creates paintings that unfold as charged psychological spaces, where gesture, colour and narrative fragment into one another. Her work often stages interiors and figures that feel simultaneously intimate and unsettled—scenes suspended between memory, imagination and emotional projection. Brushwork remains loose yet deliberate, allowing images to hover rather than resolve.

Towfiq’s practice draws on personal history, literature and the mechanics of storytelling. Figures appear partially obscured, doubled or cropped, as if slipping in and out of focus. Colour is used expressively, heightening mood and tension, while compositional shifts destabilise the viewer’s sense of time and place.

Rooted in painting as a site of introspection, Towfiq treats the canvas as a space where inner and outer worlds collide. Her works invite slow engagement, revealing narratives that are never fully fixed—images that linger, echo and quietly insist on being felt rather than explained.