Art House SF
2324 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94114 · arthousesf.com
For immediate release
Feruz Temirov: Silk Road Miniatures — Persian Painting, Made Last Year in Bukhara
Twenty miniature paintings on handmade Samarkand paper
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Gallery talks Thursday, September 24, 6:30 pm and Saturday, September 26, 2 pm
Art House SF · 2324 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94114
SAN FRANCISCO, September 10, 2026 — Visitors to Art House SF keep saying a version of the same thing. They have seen Persian miniatures before — at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, at the British Museum, in Paris. Behind glass. Five hundred years old.
What they had not seen was one painted last year, by a painter still working in Bukhara — an old Silk Road city in Uzbekistan, in Central Asia — hanging at eye level on a wall in the Castro with a price on it.
The Met holds hundreds of Persian manuscript pages and miniature paintings from the 14th through the 17th centuries. Twenty paintings in the same tradition, made in the last few years by Feruz Temirov, are on view at Art House SF through September 30. Gallery founder Max Khusid will lead two small-group talks on the tradition, on Thursday, September 24 at 6:30 pm and Saturday, September 26 at 2 pm. Each is limited to fifteen people; admission is $10, credited toward any purchase.
Almost everyone who paints this way apprenticed into it.
Temirov studied it at Bukhara State University on his father's advice, chose it for its ties to history and literature, and taught it there for eight years — a scholar of the tradition as well as a painter of it.
That choice is what hangs on the wall. Caravans on the Silk Road, lovers in a garden, a hunt, a picnic, a sultan's evening. The poets Omar Khayyam and Hafez of Shiraz. The scientists of the region — al-Farabi, al-Biruni, the astronomer Ulugh Beg. Hodja Nasreddin, the folk wise-fool Uzbeks will tell you was born in Bukhara. And two conquerors who came out of Central Asia and ruled far beyond it: Amir Temur, whom the West calls Tamerlane, and Babur, the prince from Fergana who founded the Mughal empire in India.
The Booker-shortlisted novelist Elif Shafak featured Temirov's The Wise Dervish on her Substack in January and pointed her readers to his work, writing that she admires art that “both honours old traditions and oral stories, and dares to be innovative.”
He paints on Samarkand paper, made from the inner bark of young mulberry branches and burnished with stone until it takes a silken sheen — still made the old way — with brushes of natural fibre, on sheets no larger than a letter page.
“It is a great achievement and a great happiness for me,” Temirov says, “if the miniatures I create will please not only today's art lovers but also future generations.”
In 2019 he was one of four Uzbek master craftsmen chosen to represent the country's craft traditions at the United Nations Office at Vienna. He works from his own gallery in the old city of Bukhara, and has exhibited in Russia, France, Austria and Belgium.
Art House SF has worked directly with Temirov since founder Max Khusid met him at his gallery in Bukhara in October 2024. This is Temirov's second solo exhibition here.
The show is free and open to the public through September 30. Gallery hours are Wednesday to Saturday, 11 am to 7 pm, and Sunday, 11 am to 5 pm. Paintings range from $750 to $900. The gallery will host two small-group talks on the tradition during the run, limited to fifteen people each; details at arthousesf.com.
Links
- RSVP: gallery talks on Eventbrite
- Exhibition page: Feruz Temirov: Silk Road Miniatures
- Press images with captions and credit lines: Google Drive folder. Print-resolution files on request, same day.
About Art House SF
An independent gallery at 2324 Market Street representing artists from more than twenty countries, including Uzbekistan, Japan, Iceland, Georgia, South Africa, Ukraine and Nepal. The gallery buys work directly from the artists it represents.
Press contact
Max Khusid · max@arthousesf.com · (412) 260-5436
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