Rand Maeeni

Rand Maeeni (b. 1989, Baghdad, Iraq; based in Los Angeles, USA) is a visual artist whose work investigates the intersection of materiality, gesture, and psychological presence. Raised between Iraq and the UAE before relocating to the United States, her practice is deeply informed by personal histories of displacement, endurance, and transformation. Her path, from Baghdad’s charged atmosphere where power, surveillance, and silence shaped early memory, through over a decade in global branding and design, and ultimately into full-time studio practice, reflects an ongoing pursuit of creative freedom and personal truth.

Once driven by data, strategic intent, and meticulous design decisions, Maeeni’s artistic practice now thrives on intuitive impulse, spontaneity, and the productive accidents inherent in abstract painting. Working primarily in acrylic, oil, and ink, her paintings span gestural compositions, biomorphic forms, and material minimalism. Her process is rooted in rawness and quiet rebellion. It is a negotiation between discipline and surrender, control and accident, structure and release.

The body serves not as subject but as instrument. Its rhythms, hesitations, and repetitions shape each work, inviting viewers into layered spaces of ambiguity and depth. Color becomes both signal and sensation. Line becomes both boundary and breath.

Maeeni’s approach resists catharsis and avoids easy resolution. Instead, she holds complexity with humility, allowing each piece to become a system of marks that gives form to what once felt unspeakable. She offers viewers a space where memory, materiality, and psychological resonance quietly coexist. For Maeeni, art is not resolution but residue; what remains when the body remembers and reimagines what the mind once tried to forget.

Influenced by the visual discipline of her design background and the gestural freedom of abstraction, Maeeni draws from a wide range of references. These include the material investigations of Eva Hesse, the psychological fields of Mark Rothko, the embodied mark-making of Cy Twombly, and the narrative abstraction of Julie Mehretu.

She holds a BFA in Visual Communication from the American University of Sharjah. After a decade as a creative director and agency co-founder, she now maintains a full-time studio practice in Los Angeles, developing evolving bodies of work for galleries, institutions, private collections, and cross-disciplinary collaborations.