Ali Banisadr

Ali Banisadr (b. 1976) creates a combination of realism and abstraction in his complex and large tableaux, which is placed in an imaginative perspective. His works have a chaotic and dynamic mood, and the entanglement of their ambiguous forms evokes a sense of conflict and battle.
The time and place of the abstract depicted in Banisadr's works recall mythological themes, but these dynamic and faded masses, formed with strong and energetic brushstrokes, resemble human figures or integrative faceless creatures and occasionally show signs of the real world. Color, form, and movement are inseparable in his works, and the depiction of unrelated elements that combine with their surroundings brings his workspace closer to surrealist artists.

Ali Banisadr was born in Tehran and experienced the Iraq-Iran war as a child. The memory of bombs and rockets and their terrible sound significantly impacted his mind and body, which was later reflected in his work. He believes that his works are strongly related to sound, and while working, he hears sounds that guide the structure of his paintings. This chaos and battle of abstract figures may be rooted in his war experience. Banisadr says about this experience: "Whenever there was an air raid, the alarm goes off, and we had to go to the basement, and I just painted; this was my ceremony, and it was all based on sounds and vibrations. I drew paintings of these worlds to understand what was happening around me; I couldn't see it, but I could hear it. Every time there was chaos, I performed this painting ceremony.
In 1988, when he was twelve years old, he immigrated to America with his family; during this period, he entered the world of art seriously. He first turned to graffiti, and in 2005 he studied at the New York School of Visual Arts in B.F.A. In 2006, his works were displayed in the group exhibition called "Summer Painters" in Chateau de Balleroy, Normandy, and in the same year, he won the Prince of Wales Award from the Forbes Foundation. After that, he received a master's research scholarship from the New York Art Foundation and graduated in 2016.
Over the years, he has held group and individual shows in different parts of America and Europe, but he has always been bound to his way of working, a method that is close to the abstract expressionism movement. To create his works, Banisadr draws inspiration from philosophical ideas and dialogues, as well as the works of great and prominent artists, and all these are like the voices he talks to.
Banisadr was greatly influenced by the painting "The Last Judgment" by Hieronymus Bosch, a great painter of the 15th century AD. The atmosphere of his works reminds us of the crowding, chaos, and accumulation of strange and dynamic elements of Bush's paintings. In 2019, his works were displayed in an exhibition called "Bosch & Banisadr, Ali Banisadr: We Work in Shadows," which was held in the Gemäldegalerie, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.
He also created paintings inspired by Dante's "Divine Comedy" and artists such as Botticelli, William Blake, and Rauschenberg. But Banisadr is also very interested in Iranian miniature and draws inspiration from its coloring and atmosphere. Rumi's poems had an important influence on the formation of Ali Banisadr's mentality, and as he says: "The idea in Rumi's poetry that everything is as important as other things, such as a stone, plant, human, air, and everything is a part of something else; this is the subject that I always think about in my paintings. That's why I don't have the main character in my works; Because I feel that every corner of the painting is as important as the others." Banisadr's paintings can be examined from different angles, and discovering this unknown space is important to him.