Rebecca Setareh

Rebecca Setareh was born in Iran presently an American Citizen. 

She was trained in Europe, earning her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Institut des Beaux-Arts St. Luc in Liège, Belgium. Her work as a tanager first gained recognition in Iran, where her piece The Peacock was awarded first prize by Dr. Gandji, then Iran's Minister of Education, and she received a second prize in a national competition juried by Prime Minister Hoveida and Queen Farah Diba Pahlavi, an early sign of a practice that would go on to be exhibited internationally.

At the heart of Rebecca’s sculpture is a dialogue between opposites that refuses resolution and searches for Oneness. She works primarily in bronze and raw natural stones she finds, the tension between these two materials is her focus: the smooth and refined, idealized human form integrated against a material that is part of Mother Nature rough and rigid. 

In certain pieces we can see a headless torso crowned with jagged slate and in another Three hands reaching from different directions, all gripping onto ONE  rough stone — as if the human impulse to hold, to connect, to possess, meets something that cannot be fully grasped.

Her figures are never complete. They are fragments (torsos, hands, parts of the body), and in that incompleteness they become more rather than less. What is missing becomes the question the work is asking.

Rebecca’s practice extends into driftwood photography, where she continues her lifelong inquiry into the boundary between the organic and the eternal, the driftwood that is shaped by nature and lifeless comes to life through her lens .

Across every medium, her work holds the same conviction: that beauty and weight belong together, and that the most enduring forms are those that carry both.