Ramin Saadat Gharin is a sculptor and painter whose work moves between the weight of stone and the lightness of the digital image. Born in Tehran in 1965 and now based in Vancouver, Canada, he has shaped matter for more than four decades — from monumental public bronzes in Iran to characters and creatures for film and games.
He began at sixteen, studying drawing at Tehran’s Pouya Cultural Center under the guidance of Ali Faramarzi, and later studied with Aydin Aghdashloo. In sculpture — which he took up in the early 1980s — his teacher and mentor was the late Ali Madadi. Trained also as a metallurgy engineer at Sharif University of Technology, Ramin’s early work was figurative and classical; over time it moved toward simplified, distilled forms and an ever deeper inquiry into the nature of materials and their combinations — granite against sheet iron, bronze against glass, stone against light.
His first solo exhibition, Man and Roosters (Golestan Gallery, Tehran, 1995) — roosters, and the Man in the Rain — was followed by Man and Angels: pumice-stone angels with iron wings that, in the words of critic Farah Seyed Abolvaghasem, “can no longer fly” — figures the press described as “emblems of patience and dignity,” with a man of layered crushed iron at the show’s center. A third exhibition turned to fused glass, the figures women — each body of work its own inquiry into what a material can say. Of his materials he says: “Every material carries its own expression. The angel I have seen, or long to see, I can express and build better in this material.”
His public works include the 4.2-metre bronze equestrian monument to Mirza Kuchak Khan in Rasht’s Municipality Square (1999), the 3-metre bronze Standing Horse in Isfahan, and portrait busts of figures from Iranian cultural life. His bronze Trapped Human is held by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. He was awarded second place in the First Biennial of Contemporary Sculptors and has exhibited in Tehran and Geneva.
Since 2016 he has worked as a sculptor and scenic artist in film production (IATSE Local 891), and he later trained in visual effects at Think Tank Training Centre in Vancouver — carrying over four decades of anatomy, form, and material knowledge from the carving studio into Houdini, ZBrush, and the digital worlds of film and games.