Iranian Artist’s Innovative Use of Recycled Marterials

Date: 02 May 2025 - 22:41

News ID: ۱۳۹۱۰۴

TEHRAN -- Elham Fallahi, who was born in Tehran in 1979, gained not only recognition for her distinctive artistic style but also for presenting a complex intellectual idea.
Fallahi studied painting and art in college, although her uncle, a painter and poet, taught her how to paint before she started. She earned a bachelor’s degree in painting in 2002 and a master’s degree in painting in 2007, Iran Art reported.
Since all of Fallahi’s sculptures and paintings from the past 20 years are created using used plastic, she is regarded as one of the most environmentally conscious artists in the Middle East. She gathers and recycles plastics before they end up in the trash and return to the environment by spreading awareness and working with the community, galleries, and factories. Given the current state of our environment and the depletion of its resources, she feels that nothing should be thrown away.
She recycles all of the materials produced by consumerism and the rush of human want and boredom, transforming rubbish into beauty. In this sense, she took first place in the International Green Art Festival’s sculpture category in 2008.
Furthermore, what is rarely said about Fallahi is that she includes disabled and physically challenged people in her art endeavors, and their presence in an artistic context creates a unique experience for them. That includes taking first place in the 2021 Special Technological Needs for Disabled Artists national startup contest.
Fallahi has been a lecturer at the same universities for 18 years, teaching students figurative drawing, anatomy, and sculpting.
In 2003, she had her first solo exhibition in Tehran. Over the years, Fallahi’s artwork has been shown frequently, from the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art to events in Paris and Los Angeles. Her most recent solo exhibition took place in Los Angeles, USA, in 2023 at the Hamzianpour & Kia Gallery.
Many people who are now fascinated by Fallahi’s unique concept and awestruck by her massive and stunning sculptures of mythological gods are unaware that her early work included naturalistic paintings of trees and birds, as well as figurative pieces. This phase continued during her studies, and, despite the good sales of these works, it was discontinued at that time because she was considering other horizons.
Her work for her master’s thesis project at the university served as the initial impetus for this significant advancement. Fallahi chose to concentrate on the form of insects, particularly the form of bird wings, for her thesis topic since she had a strong interest in the wings of birds and insects. She made an effort to create a connection between them and modern sculptures. Fallahi opted to make it because she was particularly drawn to a dragonfly’s transparent wing.
She experimented with a range of materials, both artistic and non-artistic. However, none of them provided her with the desired response until one day she became interested in the transparency of plastic bottles. She sought her father for advice on how to go from bottle to wing.
Her father was one of the founders of a plastic recycling firm in Tehran; thus, she was taught from a young age that nothing in the world is worth throwing away.
This was the start of her artistic transformation. Her life changed when she saw that the bottle’s transparency resembled a dragonfly’s wings. With his father’s help, she created his first plastic sculpture of an insect. And that marked the start of the second phase of this creative and curious artist’s output. Because she employed portraits and figures in her paintings, she began creating portraits with the same material.
Fallahi’s ability to paint figuratively enabled her to give her sculptures an exquisite and accurate shape and design. She was excited about this approach because of the way these pieces were received.
She concentrated on creating enormous, single-figure portraits painted in plastic at the start of this time, and they were so successful on the art market that several affluent collectors currently own specimens.
However, her aspirations went beyond this point. As the number of orders for single-figure portraits grew, she told the art market that she would no longer be producing portraits, saying, “Most definitely not right now.” To date, she has never produced a plastic portrait.
Fallahi’s new aim was to bring to life the ancient concept of the moment of creation and to incarnate mythological gods in plastic and on a big scale.
Her works of art offer a narrative and story that are relevant to today’s audience. Her visual tale delves into the invisible realm and mythologies that have been revered and understood in mysterious manners throughout history.
Even she did not anticipate such a favorable response, but the astounding ideas of “Leda & the Swan,” “Anahita,” “Adam & Eve,” and “Bundahishn” propelled her into her third period of work.
She ended up in a position where she explained to the buyer her concept and approach to the work. The work was made after the concept was sold, a method that is still used in major projects today.
The latest work from Fallahi’s third phase is “Bundahishn” [the moment of beginning creation], a breathtaking collection of six legendary figures and dozens of tiny elements, comprising all the gods such as Sepanda and Ahuramazda, which were produced with plastics obtained from the southern coast of Iran. The collection is displayed in an impressive exhibit at the Raha Gallery Collection.
After the COVID-19 epidemic and Fallahi’s immigration to the United States, colors were incorporated into the surroundings of her works, kicking off her fourth phase.
The first piece from her fourth phase, “Bahram Gur & Azadeh,” which is a rendition of an enthralling and endearing Iranian literary love story, features brilliant color.
Fallahi is getting ready for new scenes as her story and her creative discoveries with discarded materials continue.
Her works are held in prestigious collections in the United States, Europe, and Iran, including the Raha Gallery Collection (Iran-Dubai), the Mortazavi Foundation Collection (Iran-America), the DD Museum (Iran), the Dang Collection (China), the Marmar Gallery (America), the Rira Gallery (Dubai), and several private collections in Iran, France, Austria, Canada, America, and East Asia.
In the past few years, there has been an intriguing upward trend in the prices of Fallahi’s paintings. Her small pieces, such as a single rose, have been purchased for $2,500, while her huge collections, which include some figures, have sold for $240,000 at the artist’s own studio, galleries, and expos.
Her pieces have twice been put up for auction. In January 2020, at the Tehran Auction, her piece “War, Rakhsh & Homa,” constructed of similar recycled materials and measuring 120 x 100 x 150 cm (produced in 2017), sold for four times its initial price, almost $22,000 [240 million Tomans]. In 2021, a little piece by Fallahi called “Horse Head” that measured 50 x 40 x 30 cm brought $10,000 at U.S. Map Auction.