Oct. 23

Graduate Lecture: Ali Banisadr

Date
October 23, 2018
Time
10:30 AM – 12 PM
Location
Fred Lazarus IV Center
L115
131 W North Ave

Ali Banisadr was born in Tehran in 1976, he currently lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2005, and his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2007. Growing up during the Islamic revolution and the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, he and his family left Iran in 1988, moving first to Turkey and then to California.

Ali Banisadr's approach to abstraction alludes to displacement, memory, nostalgia and violence; his recent paintings weave elements from traditional Persian miniature painting together with a lush materiality and gesture. Their fractured grounds create an all-over field inflected with anarchy and carnage as inspired by his recollection of sounds during the bombings. This synesthesia connection between auditory memory and visualization is consistent throughout his work. His paintings have been featured in international surveys, such as “Love Me/Love Me Not: Contemporary Art from Azerbaijan and Its Neighbors” at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Recently, his work was included in “Rebel, Jester, Mystic Poet: Contemporary Persians” at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto (2017), which traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2017). Among public collections owning his work are the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; The British Museum; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Francois Pinault Foundation, Venice; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museum der Moderne, Salzburg. He received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting in 2010. He is represented by Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York.