Ali Banisadr
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AboutLapis, 2021
A painter of epic vistas and dazzling intricacies, Ali Banisadr creates complex, turbulent worlds whose syncopated rhythms corral a multitude of references from art history as well as allusions to our own turbulent times. These are revealed not as static, sedimentary layers but as successive waves or currents, series of abstract and semi-abstract forms that flow together, intermingle or collide, submerging and resurfacing, recast and transformed through an often lengthy process of subtraction and addition.
Their narratives – earthly, celestial, pacific or war-like – unfold in grand, ranging dramas that are informed, though far from defined, by the artist’s own life story. Born in Tehran in 1976, Banisadr left Iran with his family in 1988 at the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, moving briefly to Turkey, then to the US. Living in California for twelve years, first in San Diego then San Francisco, the artist was exposed to graffiti culture at an early age. He participated in the Mission School of graffiti in San Francisco, before attending SVA (School of Visual Arts) for his BFA, later earning an MFA from New York Academy of Art. Like artists before him, most famously Wassily Kandinsky, Banisadr is a synaesthete who perceives visions in sound. Sound continues to guide his brushstrokes – their tempo and pressure – as well as the process of bringing together often contradictory elements, which he describes as reaching ‘a certain type of harmony that I find in organising chaotic fragments into a unified symphony.’
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Selected Works
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BiographyLapis, 2021
Born in 1976 in Tehran, Iran, Ali Banisadr lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Recent solo institutional exhibitions include The Alchemist, Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, USA (2025); Return to Mother, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, USA (2024); Ali Banisadr: Beautiful Lies at Museo Bardini and Palazzo Vecchio, both in Florence, Italy (2021); Ali Banisadr/Matrix 185, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, USA (2020), and Ultramarinus - Beyond the Sea, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece (2020).
His work has been included in recent institutional group exhibitions including Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2023); Daphne without Apollo: Metamorphoses from Richter to Lassnig, The Opelvillen Foundation, Rüsselsheim, Germany, (2022); Epic Iran, V&A, London, UK (2021); A Boundless Drop to a Boundless Ocean, Orlando Museum of Art, Florida, USA (2021); Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians, Asia Society, New York, NY, USA (2021); Love Me / Love Me Not, Contemporary Art from Azerbaijan and its Neighbours, Venice Biennale, Italy (2013).
Work by the artist is included in major institutional collections including: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, USA; Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna, Austria; British Museum, London, UK; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Het Noordbrabants Museum, Den Bosch, Netherlands; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, USA; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria; Miniature Museum, The Hague, Netherlands; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA; Francois Pinault Foundation, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, USA; among others. The first major monograph on the artist was published by Rizzoli in 2021.
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News
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Hyperallergic reviews Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist
June 15, 2025‘Banisadr makes images that are relentless in their toiling motion… he paints as if bedlam is elemental…’ – Seph RodneyRead More -
Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist is reviewed by The Brooklyn Rail
June 4, 2025'...Banisadr transforms memories and observations into new worlds governed by enigmatic forces that somehow leave us looking at the light.'Read More -
New publication – Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist
April 4, 2025Accompanying the artist’s major exhibition at Katonah Museum of Art, New York is a new book, published by the museum and distributed by Yale Books...Read More -
Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist, the artist’s first major US museum survey, at Katonah Museum of Art
March 16, 2025On view 16 March–29 June 2025, the exhibition encompasses nearly twenty years of the artist’s singular practice, from 2006 to the present, across the mediums...Read More -
Ali Banisadr talks to critic John Vincler for Cultured ahead of Katonah Museum of Art exhibition
March 13, 2025'[Banisadr] looks, he reads, and has a seemingly infinite curiosity that informs and compels him in his own work. His show at Katonah welcomes everybody into the conversation.'Read More -
Ali Banisadr in conversation with Orhan Pamuk for Cultured
November 27, 2024'A painter, after all, takes the time to study their subject, to break it apart and put it back together, layer by layer. Pamuk's way of writing felt like that to me — always observing, always questioning, always rearranging things until they made sense in a new way.'Read More -
Featured in Elephant: Ali Banisadr in conversation with Huma Bhabha
May 22, 2024Despite the apparent differences between their work – one is primarily a painter and the other a sculptor – artists Ali Banisadr and Huma Bhabha have recently formed a profound friendship. In this feature in Elephant, they discuss shared passions and uncanny similarities between their practices.Read More -
Ali Banisadr: The Changing Past is reviewed by The Brooklyn Rail
November 15, 2023Imagine a reality where the future is historical and the past contemporary, where time stands still and simultaneously moves on. Ali Banisadr conjures such wondrous...Read More -
Elephant reviews Ali Banisadr: The Changing Past
November 2, 2023Ali Banisadr Pieces a Fragmented World Back Together In The Changing Past at Victoria Miro Bella Bonner-Evans Contemplating Ali Banisadr’s work is like hurtling at...Read More -
Ali Banisadr talks to Ocula
October 18, 2023Ali Banisadr Orchestrates the Senses at Victoria Miro By Annabel Downes Synaesthesia is a condition as fascinating as it is rare. Present in under five...Read More -
The Evening Standard includes Ali Banisadr and Paula Rego in the best free London exhibitions
October 13, 2023 Read More -
Whitewall features Ali Banisadr: The Changing Past in its best London exhibitions
October 12, 2023The practice of Ali Banisadr carefully draws from history, art history, and the techniques of various schools of art and cultural traditions, which are woven...Read More -
Ali Banisadr: The Changing Past features in Ocula’s London must-see gallery exhibitions
October 9, 2023 Read More -
The RA Summer Exhibition 2023 opens at the Royal Academy of Arts
June 13, 2023The RA Summer Exhibition is now open to the public at the R oyal Academy of Arts, London. On view are works by Victoria Miro...Read More -
Artist Conversation: Ali Banisadr at Princeton University
April 7, 2023Thursday, April 13, 2023 @ 5:30 pm Location Mathey College Common Room On the occasion of the installation of his artwork Return to Mother at...Read More -
Works by Ali Banisadr and Paula Rego feature in Daphne without Apollo: Metamorphoses from Richter to Lassnig at The Opelvillen Foundation
March 13, 2022The exhibition (13 March–31 July 2022) showcases works from the Klöcker Collection that depict the transformations of creatures or objects into something else. The exhibition...Read More -
Ali Banisadr features in the V&A’s major new exhibition Epic Iran
May 29, 2021The exhibition (opening 29 May, booking to 12 September 2021) explores five thousand years of art, design and culture and shines a light on one...Read More -
Artforum on Ali Banisadr at the Benaki Museum
April 1, 2021'Banisadr’s imagery is mutable, the shapes materializing, shifting, and dissolving under the gaze and the alchemy of myriad cultural references and contexts.' – Cathryn Drake...Read More -
A brush with... Ali Banisadr – the Art Newspaper Podcast
March 31, 2021As the artist prepares for a two-part exhibition in Florence, Ali Banisadr discusses his life and work through the cultural epiphanies and influences that have...Read More -
Announcing representation of Ali Banisadr
February 9, 2021Victoria Miro is delighted to announce the representation of Ali Banisadr . The Brooklyn-based artist, acclaimed for his urgent, ravishing paintings that deftly combine elements...Read More -
Ali Banisadr talks to Bomb Magazine
January 28, 2021Finding Hope in the Chaos: Ali Banisadr Interviewed by Osman Can Yerebakan Paintings that blend and blur the world together. When Brooklyn-based painter Ali Banisadr...Read More -
Ali Banisadr talks to Artflyer
January 25, 2021At the Benaki Museum’s top floor gallery with its walls of a muted shade of aquamarine, Iranian born American artist Ali Banisadr pairs his paintings...Read More -
Ali Banisadr features in A Boundless Drop to a Boundless Ocean at Orlando Museum of Art
January 19, 2021A collaboration between the Orlando Museum of Art and the American University in Cairo, the exhibition (29 January–2 May 2021) presents work by 21 US-based...Read More -
Ali Banisadr: Ultramarinus – Beyond the Sea at Benaki Museum
November 3, 2020The Benaki Museum is hosting Ali Banisadr’s first solo exhibition in Greece entitled Ultramarinus – Beyond the Sea, at the Spyridon & Eurydice Costopoulos Gallery,...Read More -
Ali Banisadr talks to The Wall Street Journal
October 23, 2020As a boy in Tehran in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War, Ali Banisadr had a friend whose apartment building was sliced neatly in half...Read More -
Ali Banisadr at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
October 22, 2020A major exhibition of paintings by the artist (22 October 2020–14 February 2021). In addition, Banisadr has cruated a small selection of Wadsworth collection works...Read More -
The Art Grind Podcast – Ali Banisadr: Zen and the Symphonic Time Machine
March 20, 2020You paint an eye. Is this the eye that everybody sees? Or is this the eye that only you see, and to you it means...Read More -
Ali Banisadr is interviewed by Harper’s Bazaar Arabia
January 14, 2020For American-Iranian painter Ali Banisadr, creating art is beyond a pure hobby or a choice, it’s a necessity. Growing up amidst the Iranian Revolution and...Read More -
Ali Banisadr talks to Elephant
August 12, 2019Sound is not something people tend to connect with painting. The countless museum canvases that celebrate modern and contemporary icons are, for the majority, silent...Read More -
The Brooklyn Rail – Art in Conversation: Ali Banisadr
October 1, 2018One of the most poignant responses to the perpetual condition of being in exile is credited to Jonas Mekas, the legendary Godfather of American Avant-garde...Read More
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Gallery Exhibitions
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Ali Banisadr: The Changing Past
11 Oct – 11 Nov 2023 London Gallery IIThe first solo presentation of works by the New York-based artist since he joined the gallery in 2021 features a substantial body of paintings completed over the past two years.Learn More -
Cinematic Visions: Painting at the Edge of Reality
8 Jun – 3 Aug 2013Njideka Akunyili, Jules de Balincourt, Ali Banisadr, Hernan Bas, Joe Bradley, Cecily Brown, Peter Doig, Inka Essenhigh, Eric Fischl, Barnaby Furnas, David Harrison, Secundino Hernández, Nicholas Hlobo, Chantal Joffe, Sandro...Learn More
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Contact Form
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