BIO

Christina Habibi is an abstract painter born in Tehran, Iran, and based in Athens, Georgia. She's maintained a studio practice for over three decades.

Her work has been featured in the Twin Cities PBS series Minnesota Original, which documented her creative process, and artwork by Habibi was included in the film Dear White People.

Habibi continues to explore the possibilities of abstraction through an evolving body of work.

STATEMENT

I make abstract paintings that move between gesture, language, and recognition. Forms, fragments of text, color, and layered marks compete for attention, creating images that feel caught between becoming something and slipping away from it.

I start without a fixed composition. My first stroke sets the painting in motion, and I respond to what develops rather than directing it toward a predetermined image. Forms emerge, disappear, collide, and change as the surface builds. Words enter at different stages of the process, sometimes reinforcing what's happening visually and sometimes interrupting it. I let language and paint occupy the same space without requiring one to explain the other.

I'm drawn to images that are difficult to pin down. A form can suggest a body, object, landscape, or something entirely unfamiliar, then shift again before recognition becomes certain. That instability matters to me. We’re constantly asked to identify, define, and make sense of what we encounter, while much of experience remains contradictory, unfinished, or in transition.

I want the paintings to hold those competing possibilities at once. Rather than directing the viewer toward a single interpretation, I build images that continue changing the longer you look.