Aida Mahmudova is an Azerbaijani artist. She is best known for being founder of YARAT Contemporary Art Space. Early life and education Mahmudova was born on 10 January 1982 in Baku. In 2006, she graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London with a BA Degree in Fine Art. In 2009, she graduated from the American Intercontinental University with a BA Degree in Fashion Marketing. Career In 2011, she founded YARAT, a not-for-profit contemporary art organisation based in Baku, Azerbaijan. Since 2012, Mahmudova has been Director of the Baku Museum of Modern Art. Same year she founded YAY Gallery, a social enterprise which is now operating as ARTIM Project Space. She works in installation, sculpture and painting to capture forgotten and marginal corners of her rapidly modernising country. She has participated in exhibitions with other artists and her works have been exhibited internationally. In 2015, she had her first solo exhibition ‘Passing By’ in the US at the Leila Heller Gallery. Mahmudova's work has been shown at the 55th Venice Biennale for the group exhibition Love Me, Love Me Not (2013) and at the 56th Venice Biennale at the exhibition Vita Vitale curated by Artwise (2015). In 2021, her work was presented alongside others in the "Safar: Journey in the Middle East" exhibition by historian Farian Sabahi in Parma, Italy, showing the Middle East in the year before significant conflicts in the area began. Style Early on in her work, Mahmudova developed a curiosity towards material, which manifested itself through experimentation with light, color and matter in her landscapes and semi-abstract canvases. As her paintings became increasingly more layered, the artist expanded her practice into the three-dimensional, applying the same approach to sculpture and creating environments both emotive and intense. She continually mixes layer upon layer of diverse material, such as paper, clay, paint, cement, stone, and, more recently, epoxy resin and untreated marble. Mahmudova’s choice of colour is various. Her artworks show good understanding of colour matching. She can use thick, high contrast colour to create energetic, colourful paintings. She seldom uses bright tone of the colour. For example, her ‘Rambling Vine, 2015’ demonstrates her use of thick, dry layer of pigment to create the rough texture. And she tends to tone down the bright colour like typical yellow to be macaroon yellow mixed with pickle green and grey. These mixture of colour is cohesive