Ali Banisadr

Ali Banisadr was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1976 and emigrated with his family to California in 1988 before eventually settling in New York City. He earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2005 and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2007, and he continues to live and work in Brooklyn. His paintings — dense, turbulent, and layered with art-historical memory — draw on personal experience of displacement and conflict while engaging a vast visual inheritance that ranges from Old Master battle scenes to Persian miniature traditions. The result is a body of work that critics have described in terms of pandemonium, calamity, and alchemical transformation, yet which retains an unmistakably lyrical, even musical, internal order.

Banisadr's institutional presence is extensive. His work enters the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the British Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. Solo exhibitions have taken his practice to the Benaki Museum in Athens, the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Vienna, the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, the Wadsworth Atheneum, and Museo Bardini and Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, among many others. His 2025 survey The Alchemist, which opened at the Katonah Museum of Art and is traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, in 2026, with further venues at the Rose Art Museum and the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art planned through 2028, marks a significant moment of institutional consolidation. Also in 2026, Temple of the Mind is presented at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and a carte blanche exhibition, Talisman, is mounted at the Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris — a pairing that Le Monde has framed as a dialogue between two painters who have consistently worked outside the mainstream.

His gallery representation spans Perrotin in Paris and Shanghai, Kasmin Gallery in New York, Victoria Miro and Cristea Roberts Gallery in London, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, where solo presentations have included In Medias Res in 2015, Ordered Disorders in 2019, Return to Mother in 2022, and Talisman in 2026. Critical attention has been sustained and international: extended essays and reviews have appeared in Artforum, Frieze, ArtReview, The Guardian, Apollo Magazine, Die Zeit, Le Monde, and El País, among others. Rizzoli New York has published a monograph devoted to his work. A painting from his mature period, He Who Saw the Deep (2021), is among the works associated with this phase of his practice, which continues to attract both institutional and critical engagement across Europe, the Americas, and beyond.