Paasha Motamedi is an Iranian-Indonesian-American artist raised on Coronado Island, educated in New York City, and currently based in Los Angeles. With a multidisciplinary approach, Paasha Motamedi's creative journey—shaped by experiences in poetry, cooking, music, and visual arts—evolved further after embracing sobriety in 2015, expanding into slow-motion videography, photography, painting, and most recently, perfume-making. His primary mediums include oil stick, acrylic, and unconventional materials such as saffron, black dried lime, pomegranate, sabzi, spackling, clay, sand, gravel, and fire—often working on rugs to vandalize orientalized objects through a visceral para-abstraction aesthetic.
Recently, Motamedi extended his artistic expression into the realm of fragrance, a natural evolution that draws from the scents of his Persian and Indonesian childhood kitchen. His perfumes incorporate ingredients like sabzi, saffron, limoo amani, kefir limes, beef rendang, and tahdig. These fragrances stand independently from his visual art as commercial products designed to evoke desirability, making the wearer feel “delicious” to themselves and others. Yet, like his paintings, they often evoke personal memories, offering something familiar and immediately legible to those who encounter them.
Currently, Motamedi continues his work on rugs while honing his curatorial skills with a show of works on paper at Known Studio as he simultaneously launches a new fragrance line Paasha Jaan. His artistic process is one of duality—marked by periods of intense productivity and introspective pauses that allow him to balance execution with reflection.