Ali Banisadr: These Specks of Dust
Past exhibition
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Kasmin is pleased to present the gallery’s first solo exhibition of work by artist Ali Banisadr (b.1976, Tehran). Comprising nine recent paintings, several of which were included in Banisadr’s critically-acclaimed museum show at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, in 2020-21, the exhibition will also include a new large-scale diptych, the first multi-panel work by the artist in six years. These Specks of Dust coincides with the publication of a major monograph by Rizzoli Electa featuring contributions from Negar Azimi, Robert Hobbs, Joe Lin-Hill, and John Yau.
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Banisadr’s vivid and turbulent paintings conjure an energetic sense of the world by depicting the quintessentially cyclical nature of our collective history. Titled in homage to Francisco Goya’s 1799 etching from the Los Caprichos series, “Those Specks of Dust,” the exhibition assembles varied art historical references with deeply personal symbolism to depict the artist’s inner visions. Its title encompasses all the senses in which the micro and macro inform one another, from the elemental minerals of pigment that constitute Banisadr’s painterly materials to the imperceptible cells of virus that defined the year in which the works were realized.
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The significance of memory, both personal and collective, emerges prominently in the works. Banisadr’s adoption of mythological time, or a history that expands to encompass fantasy, myths, and ideologies, acts to question modernism’s notions of progress and highlight our systems of time as a cultural construct. Drawing from ancient epic poems such as Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and Dante’s Inferno, Banisadr is a collector of stories and their archetypes.
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Far from languishing in historical record, the essence of these narratives endures in both contemporary life and our imaginings of the future. The artist has said, "I am fascinated by this encyclopedic gathering of fragments of knowledge and weaving them together to create a visionary world." As plague and carnival circle one another in perpetuity, Banisadr observes as an all-seeing-eye, rendering the essences of humanity on the canvas.
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Banisadr’s work also intersects with our increasingly technological futures. Occupying a space between the logic of analogue and digital, the paintings glitch as if in information overload. Writer Negar Azimi has likened them to “the contemporary experience of negotiating the digital detritus of the internet; one image or idea leads to another—an exquisite corpse—a million tabs open; rabbit holes everywhere.”As warps, folds, and layers are presented in simultaneity, subject gives way to landscape of frenzy.
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Works
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About the Artist
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