Straddling abstraction and realism, Ali Banisadr’s paintings are characteristically chaotic, a cacophony of color and brush strokes that bar the viewer from finding a central focal point. From this chaos, barely recognizable landscapes and figures emerge. Banisadr brings these figures to light more clearly in this series of drawings, Untitled (At Once), extracted from a group of paintings completed in 2015. Although created after the paintings were finished, the reduction of the drawings to their most basic and graphic state gives insight into Banisadr’s creative process and the systems of mark-making that generate his larger compositions. Like glyphs in a language or notes in a music composition, the drawings provide essential visual anchors to the frenzied world of Banisadr’s paintings.
Ali Banisadr was born in Iran in 1976 and he currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 2005 and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2007. He has held nine solo shows, participated in numerous groups and is represented in collections in Europe and the United States, including the British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.