"Ali Banisadr is emerging as one of the definitive voices of his generation. His visionary practice aligns the personal and the collective to acutely and poetically decipher our tempestuous era."-Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe

Ali Banisadr creates expansive, intricately layered paintings, drawings, etchings, and sculptures that balance chaos and composure. Drawing from autobiography, sonic memory, mythology, and world history, his work unfolds in turbulent, dreamlike realms that reflect on the human condition.

For over two decades, Banisadr has developed a distinctive style of abstract painting that alchemizes an encyclopedic span of art historical, cultural, and literary references into a single, remarkable vision. Characterized by layers of confident gestural marks finished with emergent details-symbols, figures, beasts-that recur across his work as motifs, Banisadr's paintings are worlds unto themselves. Allegorical and mythological, they powerfully transmit an experience of simultaneous action and reaction, alluding to narrative while grappling with the ambiguous nature of memory, imagination, and dream. More recently, Banisadr has extended the vocabulary of his paintings into three dimensions with bronze sculpture, and realized pastel and charcoal works on paper that reflect his ritual daily practice of spontaneous drawing.

Informed by a transhistorical, cross-cultural sensibility, Banisadr draws parallels between primordial biomorphic forms, early cave painting, ancient histories, Old Master drawings, Persian miniatures, the multifigured history paintings of the Renaissance, Surrealism's alternate realities, and the emotive, highly physical process of action painting. As if from a bird's-eye view, Banisadr's perspective exposes the many arcs of human civilization and image-making. Joe Lin-Hill, Deputy Director of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, has described this as "an abstract painterly amalgam that expresses a particular view on history and the multitudinous stories of which it is composed." Banisadr's paintings are equally concerned with the contemporary era and humanity's possible futures, and increasingly allude to the subtle encroachment of technology in visual culture and perception.

The work's sense of motion and orchestral energetics are attributable in part to the artist's experiences as a young child during the Iran-Iraq war. Rendering the sounds of conflict into vivid color, Banisadr makes sense of these formative memories by emphasizing the theme of duality at the heart of the human condition. In 1988, when the artist was twelve, Banisadr left Iran with his family and settled in San Diego, California, later moving to San Francisco to study psychology.