Ali Banisadr

Ali Banisadr's first major monograph delves into the Iranian painter's influences and practice.

Preeminent Iranian-American artist Ali Banisadr's canvases depict a complex swirl of action and abstracted figuration across a stagelike picture plane. Varied histories inform these paintings, ranging from the artist's synesthesia, to Persian miniatures, to the multi-figure works of Brueghel and Bosch, and the gestural imaginations of Willem de Kooning and Max Ernst.

Born in Tehran in 1976, Ali Banisadr grew up during the Islamic revolution and the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. In 1988, he and his family emigrated to Turkey and then to California. In 2000, he moved to New York City where he currently lives and works.

Negar Azimi is a writer and the senior editor of Bidoun. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Harper's, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. Robert Hobbs, an art historian and curator specializing in twentieth- and twentieth-first century art, is the author of over fifty books and major catalogues on topics ranging from Abstract Expressionism to Earth Art and from Modernism to Post-Modernism. Joe Lin-Hill is Deputy Director of the Albright-Knox Museum. John Yau is a poet and critic who lives in New York. He has published over fifty books of poetry, artists' books, fiction, and art criticism.