Nicolette Mishkan b. 1986, Los Angeles

Nicolette Mishkan's paintings originate from intimate, water-based rituals she stages and performs in with herself and friends, treating ceremony as a site of transformation, devotion, and embodied knowledge. Drawing on her experience as an Iranian American, she weaves together a personal iconography informed by Persian cultural memory, Sufi and Kabbalistic mysticism, and other esoteric and dissident traditions. Recurring symbols—the mermaid, wine, chalices, latex hoods, water, sacred gestures of the hand—form a visual language for a body suspended on the threshold between the corporeal and the divine.

Photography serves as a point of departure rather than a destination: staged images are transformed through oil into mythic, archetypal compositions, layered and reimagined via translucent washes, texture, and light. This movement between documentation and invention allows each work to drift from the specific toward the universal, holding uncertainty, desire, and spiritual transformation in a single suspended moment.

Nicolette Mishkan (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) received a B.F.A in Fashion Design from the Otis College of Art and Design in 2008. Nicolette has had solo exhibitions at Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles, (2025); One Wall Gallery, Paris, (2021); and Shoot the Lobster, Los Angeles, (2020). Her work has been featured in group shows at Nazarian/Curcio, Los Angeles; Marinaro Gallery, New York; Galerie Marguo, Paris; The Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; Lyles and King, New York; and Nicodim, Los Angeles, among others.