Zhaleh Farhoumand

Zhaleh Farhoumand is a contemporary artist based in Brighton, England, whose practice redefines portraiture through the intimate medium of fingerprints. Known for her distinctive fingerprint portraits, she constructs images solely with the imprint of her non-dominant right index finger, transforming human touch into both material and metaphor. Although ambidextrous, she deliberately limits herself to this single gesture, embracing restriction as a way to heighten the raw immediacy of mark-making.

Her artistic journey began in childhood, shaped by a home filled with paintings, masks, and sculptures collected by her parents, whose passion for auctions and antiques immersed her early in the language of objects and histories. She went on to study at Chelsea College of Arts (Foundation in Art) and the University of Brighton (BA in Printed Textile Design with Business). Returning to painting, her background in textiles continues to inform her sensitivity to surfaces, layering, and composition.

Drawing on her Persian and South African heritage, Zhaleh’s practice explores the richness of human diversity and the universal traces we leave behind. Her portraits celebrate the individuality of faces across cultures, while the fingerprint—a marker of identity and mortality—becomes the skin, structure, and memory of the work itself.

Following the death of her father, a psychiatrist whose work shaped her lifelong interest in faces and psychology, her art deepened into an exploration of impermanence and legacy. Fingerprints, unique and unrepeatable, stand in her practice as both evidence of existence and a voice that endures beyond life.

For Zhaleh, these works are not painted in the traditional sense but created through human touch. Each fingerprint is an intimate mark that bridges the personal and the universal, transforming the act of making into a meditation on presence, loss, and the enduring human need to be seen.

At a time when artificial intelligence and digital technologies can generate images instantly, Zhaleh’s process insists on the raw, imperfect presence of the human hand. The fingerprint, once a symbol of individuality, now increasingly entangled with systems of surveillance, technology, and identity, becomes for her the most human mark we have left. Through this intimate and unique touch, her work resists automation and uniformity, affirming our shared fragility and our enduring need to be seen.