Ali Banisadr

Painter Ali Banisadr (1976Born in Tehran, Iran)makes frenetic, fantastical large-scale landscapes that conjure chaos, violence, displacement, and memory with flurries of gesture and color. Ali Banisadr’s densely populated paintings are influenced by the artist’s perception of sound as inextricably linked to color and form. Using precise, muscular brushstrokes, he creates compositions inspired by mythology, art history, his childhood memories of Tehran during the Iran–Iraq War, and his experience of synesthesia, which inextricably links sound to color and form. His work evokes the Abstract Expressionist canvases of Willem de Kooning, the densely packed panoramas of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch, and glitching digital imagery. Banisadr has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the S.M.A.K. Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Benaki Museum, among other institutions. In 2013, he participated in the 55th Venice Biennale. Banisadr’s work has sold for six figures on the secondary market and belongs in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Olbricht Foundation, Saatchi Gallery, the Francois Pinault Foundation, and the British Museum.

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Banisadr draws freely from an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of painting to create a distinctive visual language. Whilst his gestural brushstrokes recall the unbridled energy of de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionism, the work’s intensity of mood and dreamlike detail evokes mid-20th-century surrealism in the vein of Francis Bacon. Much like Old Masters Bruegel and Bosch, whom Banisadr cites as influences, the artist’s work conceives of a concurrent, existentially absurd flurry of activity as seen from above. As the lower portions of the picture planes brim with carnivalesque energy, the upper halves achieve balance in their calming sense of distance, functioning like the flattened, scenic backdrop of a theatre stage. Banisadr’s oscillating use of cool and warm tones works to denote either landscape or flesh, though the abstracted forms, fading in and out of focus like figures from a dream, resist total comprehension.

Reference: https://darz.art/fa/artists/ali-banisadr