Ali Banisadr

Painter Ali Banisadr makes frenetic, fantastical large-scale landscapes that conjure chaos, violence, displacement, and memory with flurries of gesture and color. 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.