Ali Banisadr: Red: Online

May 20 – December 1, 2020

  • Ali Banisadr’s latest painting, Red, embodies the existential force of the natural world and the artistic urge to reconcile chaos through the act of creation. Banisadr began the large-scale painting in late 2019 before stepping away from the work in January 2020. Despite its appearance of completion, Banisadr “had a sense that I needed to do more to it.” After the global pandemic struck and countries across the world went into lockdown, he says, “the work made sense to me in a new way.” Banisadr then revisited the painting with renewed dedication, finishing at the end of March 2020.

     
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  • Ali Banisadr (b. 1976, Tehran) creates densely populated paintings influenced by the artist’s perception of sound as inextricably linked to...

    Ali Banisadr (b. 1976, Tehran) creates densely populated paintings influenced by the artist’s perception of sound as inextricably linked to color and form. Drawing on childhood experiences of the Iran-Iraq war, as well as his extant synesthesia, Banisadr works painstakingly and intuitively to build complex compositions that exude a vitality at once turbulent and celebratory. Drawing freely from an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of painting, Banisadr’s gestural brushstrokes create a distinctive visual language, with unbridled energy and dreamlike detail.

    With its evocation of pandemonium reinforced by an all-over composition, Red is typical of Banisadr’s eclectic style that draws on both ancient and contemporary sources. The work conceives of an existentially absurd flurry of activity as seen from above—as figures emerge from the dense and dynamic lower portion of the painting, a symbolic blue moon presides prophetically overhead. Banisadr’s use of blazing color is anchored by the painting’s cardinal red sky, a reference that recalls Old Testament turmoil and the impending threat or promise of revelation.

  • Works
    • Ali Banisadr, Red, 2020
      Ali Banisadr, Red, 2020
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  • I have always been interested in Henri Bergson's philosophy about how Consciousness is the property of the universe, it exists outside of us, our brains are like antennas and can tune into different frequencies of consciousness, the information is in the air like radio frequency, you just have to be able to tune in to catch it. This is how I work in the studio.

  • Banisadr’s interlaced spatiality — warps, folds, layers, blots abound — reflects the psychological knots attendant upon our remaining physical beings...
    Banisadr’s interlaced spatiality — warps, folds, layers, blots abound — reflects the psychological knots attendant upon our remaining physical beings in a cyber-reality that increasingly dematerializes into multi-dimensionality. Yet it also bespeaks the need to test constraints alongside an ultimate elision of fixity.
    —DAVID ANFAM, Ali Banisadr Vol. 2
  • Inspiration images from Ali Banisadr's studio
    Inspiration images from Ali Banisadr's studio
    Inspiration images from Ali Banisadr's studio
  • The figures are about trying to stay true to my own memory of things, almost like a dream that is constantly shifting and just out of my grasp, a metamorphosis of transforming into some other element. I see my canvases as playgrounds for things from different times to dwell in; a sort of time machine where these figures can meet and exchange ideas.
  • Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, 1562-63, Muse Nacional del Prado, Madrid Hieronymus Bosch, Last Judgment Triptych (detail),...
    Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, 1562-63, Muse Nacional del Prado, Madrid Hieronymus Bosch, Last Judgment Triptych (detail),...
    Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, 1562-63, Muse Nacional del Prado, Madrid Hieronymus Bosch, Last Judgment Triptych (detail),...

    Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, 1562-63, Muse Nacional del Prado, Madrid
    Hieronymus Bosch, Last Judgment Triptych (detail), 1504-08, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna
    Max Ernst, Europe after the Rain I1, 1940-42. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY / Ernst, Max (1891-1976) © ARS, NY

     

     

  • For Banisadr, this is the main aspect that connects his art to that of Bosch: the creation of worlds that do not exist, but which encourage us to think about the world that surrounds us. Both artists cross the boundaries
    between reality and fantasy, space and time.
    -JULIA M. NAUHAUS, Bosch & Banisadr Ali Banisadr: We Work in Shadows
    • Hieronymus Bosch, Ascent of the Blessed (from the polyptych Visions of the Hereafter), 1505-15, Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice

      Hieronymus Bosch, Ascent of the Blessed (from the polyptych Visions of the Hereafter), 1505-15, Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice

  • Lee Krasner, The Eye is the First Circle, 1960, © 2020 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
  • Banisadr's paintings are supratemporal: while the event they display is unique to each painting and viewer, they have in common...
    Banisadr's paintings are supratemporal: while the event they display is unique to each painting and viewer, they have in common an energetic charge that is the product of Banisadr's capacity to simultaneously engage with and synthesise the deep past, the remote past, the near past, the present, this very instant, the near future, the far future, so on and so forth to infinity.
    -AZAREEN VAN DER VLIET OLOOMI, Ali Banisadr Vol. 2
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  • Ali Banisadr lives and works in New York City. Banisadr is the subject of upcoming solo exhibitions at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, Hartford, CT, Benaki Museum, Athens, and Museo Stefano Bardini & Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, and he was recently the subject of solo and two-person museum exhibitions at Gemäldegalerie, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Het Noordbrabants Museum, Den Bosch, Netherlands and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, FL. In 2013, his work was included in "Love Me/Love Me Not, Contemporary Art from Azerbaijan and its Neighbors," The 55th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, and “Expanded Painting," Prague Biennale 6. Banisadr is the subject of a forthcoming monograph, published by Rizzoli, to be released Spring 2021 to coincide with his upcoming exhibition at Kasmin.


    PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

    Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
    Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna, Austria
    British Museum, London, United Kingdom
    Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
    Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
    Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
    Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
    Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
    Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria
    Miniature Museum, The Hague, Netherlands
    Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
    Olbricht Foundation, Berlin, Germany
    François Pinault Foundation, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy
    Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom
    Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH
    Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
    Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg, Austria
    Würth Collection, Künzelsau, Germany
    Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels, Belgium

    Learn more about Ali Banisadr

    Watch Ali Banisadr’s conversation with Patricia Hickson, Emily Hall Tremaine Curator of Contemporary Art, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, hosted by Art Basel Online Viewing Rooms Events

    Watch Ali Banisadr’s conversation with David Anfam, hosted by the Brooklyn Rail

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