The Buffalo Art Museum presents works by Ali Banisadr – unfolding a panorama across painting, drawing and works on paper to examine humanity’s enduring drive toward becoming, change, mutation, and renewal. The title of the exhibition, borrowed from Albert Pinkham Ryder’s enigmatic painting, “The Temple of the Mind”, serves as a conceptual framework for the project, suggesting a space where perception, memory, and imagination converge.

While the Romantic painter was admired for his pioneering, semi-abstract style, for Banisadr, Ryder holds a space for contemplation amid rising uncertainties. He merges the compositional elements of landscape painting with abstract mark-making to create an altogether new form of figuration.

The resulting compositions are a carefully composed bedlam of forms that suggest but ultimately deny any specific narrative. Variously reminiscent of gardens of Eden, the seasonal genre pictures of Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and Boschian depictions of Hell, Banisadr’s contemporary abstractions call upon the history of painting.  

In Banisadr’s highly-detailed paintings, the artist coaxes characters and hybrid figures out of atmospheres of color and brushwork. Though his paintings appear from afar like intricate abstractions, closer inspection reveals that each painting is a world unto itself, rich with narrative suggestion and mysterious imagery.

Mythic birds, menacing creatures, and costumed beings all float to the surface of the painting from within a vortex of marks, lines, shapes, and patterns. Appearing sometimes like sweeping landscapes and other times like stage sets, Banisadr’s painted scenes imagine unique realms, while also drawing on references ranging from ancient to futuristic. For Banisadr, each of his paintings is a world unto itself that weaves together history, mythology, autobiographical narratives, sonic memories, and global events, while offering the artist’s own reflections on the human condition.

Ali Banisadr lived with his family in Tehran, Iran until the age of 12. Growing up during the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, Banisadr experienced sounds and sights (such as a bomb crater in his schoolyard) that had a lasting impact on his sensory foundations—events that had particular resonance on his aesthetic formation, given his experience of synaesthesia, in which he perceives visual forms as sounds, and vice-versa.

Although Banisadr studied psychology in college as a means of better understanding his own sensory experience, he later became involved in the Bay Area graffiti scene before attending art school in New York, receiving his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2005, and his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2007.  

A voracious reader and student of art history, Banisadr draws inspiration from artistic predecessors across multiple genres and time periods, stretching from Mesopotamian antiquities, to Persian miniatures, to alchemical, magical, and surreal imagery in 16th and 17th-century European painting, to the 20th-century movements of surrealism and abstract expressionism. 

Key touch points include the artists Hieronymus Bosch, Leonora Carrington, Francisco Goya, Utagawa Hiroshige, Lee Krasner, Tintoretto, and Diego Velázquez, whose varied influences can be seen in Banisadr’s aerial perspectives, expressive strokes, rich tonal palettes, dream-like sequences, and dramatic atmospheric moods his paintings evoke. At the same time, Banisadr’s paintings bear the traces of contemporary cultural references ranging from the Adventures of TinTin to the early-90s graffiti scene of the Bay Area.

Having grown up in the tumultuous conditions of war and revolution, his paintings are above all solemn ruminations on current events and the disjunctive conditions—both hopeful and dystopian—that can punctuate modern life.

Buffalo AKG Art Museum
“Temple of the Mind”
June 26 – November 8, 2026
https://buffaloakg.org/art/exhibitions/ali-banisadr-temple-mind

Representation of Ali Banisadr:
https://www.alibanisadr.com/
https://www.perrotin.com/
https://ropac.net/
https://www.victoria-miro.com/

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