Aliye Akbarzade

Aliye Akbarzade is a visual artist based in Toronto working across painting, drawing, mixed media, collage, and photography. Painting is central to her practice, where she creates layered works using acrylic paint, collage, and stitching on surfaces including paper, fabric, and photographic materials. Thread functions both formally and conceptually in her work, referencing repair, labor, and care.
Her practice explores themes of identity, dislocation, vulnerability, and memory. Drawing from film stills, found photographs, and personal imagery, she develops compositions through processes of fragmentation, reconstruction, and material experimentation. Collage plays an important role in shifting meaning and building emotional tension within the work.
Akbarzade began her artistic practice in Iran, where she completed her BFA and MFA and participated in solo and group exhibitions. Her graduate research on spontaneity, play, and game shaped a more open and responsive approach to making. Since moving to Canada, her work has evolved in response to a new cultural environment, becoming increasingly layered and complex through repeated faces, eyes, and dense patterns.
Recent exhibitions in Toronto, including How Do I Look? and Looking In, Looking Out, focus more prominently on the female figure and the dualities within human experience — fragmentation and connection, visibility and concealment. Through ongoing experimentation with materials and form, Akbarzade creates emotionally charged works that invite reflection, intimacy, and close looking.

Artist statement will be available soon.