For Ali Banisadr, every painting begins as sound. Colour, form and image are shaped by what he hears, a form of synaesthesia that was already present by the time he was three, when the Islamic Revolution of 1979 transformed Iran, and the world around him became a barrage of noise: the wail of sirens, distant explosions, shattering windows, vibrations moving through the walls of the family home. Through drawing, he translated that overwhelming onslaught into image, instinctively organising what he could not yet articulate and, without realising it, already constructing an internal world capable of processing the external one.
Those memories receded after his family left Iran in 1988, only to return with unexpected force in 2006, when a visit to the D-Day landing sites in Normandy reawakened them. The visit triggered a flood of childhood sensory memories that have continued to fuel his practice ever since.
The paintings that followed carry the same sensory flux: figures and architectural fragments emerge and dissolve within fields of colour in constant motion. Mythology, history, catastrophe and memory coexist without hierarchy. Forms appear the way recollection itself operates: partially retained, partially lost, constantly reorganising in the act of return.
Biography as Foundation
Banisadr’s biography is not incidental. It runs through everything he makes. Born in Tehran in 1976, he left Iran with his family in 1988 when the war ended, aged twelve, travelling first to Turkey before settling in San Diego and later the San Francisco Bay Area. The abrupt transition from war-torn Tehran to American suburbia was disorienting, though the Bay Area offered something in return: the visual intensity of the Mission District graffiti scene, whose scale, density, and rhythmic energy left a lasting imprint before he turned fully to oil painting. It was in the Bay Area that he also studied psychology in the late 1990s, partly to better understand the neurological mechanisms behind synaesthesia and perception. He moved to New York in 2000, earning a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. He has lived and worked in Brooklyn since, with a studio in the Hudson Valley enabling a shift towards increasingly monumental canvases. Those successive relocations would later shape the fractured sensory and spatial logic of the paintings themselves, producing what Banisadr has described as a kind of permanent double vision, shaped by movement between radically different cultural and political realities and by the distance between official narratives and lived experience.
References and Range
His references are wide-ranging. Bosch and Bruegel inform his densely populated views of human helplessness before larger forces. Goya, Velázquez, and Poussin feed the work, with Poussin offering a specific model of painting as contemplation during upheaval. Persian miniatures underpin his flattened, multi-perspective spatial logic. Venetian light, Japanese woodblock prints, Mesopotamian antiquities, and alchemical imagery all enter without being resolved into a single synthesis. His attraction to these traditions is less tied to subject matter than to their formal qualities — rhythm, vibration, tension, and spatial organisation as generators of psychological intensity. Abstract Expressionism joins the conversation through its energetic mark-making.
This fluid understanding of cultural history crystallised during preparations for his exhibition Ultramarinus: Beyond the Sea at the Benaki Museum in Athens, when Banisadr encountered a Ming Dynasty vase made with cobalt sourced from the Iran-Iraq region and inscribed with a poem by Attar of Nishapur. For him, it embodied what his practice already demonstrated: that cultures and traditions have always moved through one another far more freely than rigid East-West distinctions suggest.
The Work Itself
Seen up close, Banisadr’s canvases dissolve into near-abstraction: layered passages of mark-making applied with brushes, rags, sticks, and his own hand-mixed pigments to preserve precise tonal relationships. Step back, and they reassemble into unstable worlds — spectral figures and architectural fragments emerge from roiling atmospheric fields, only to dissolve again. The paintings do not document specific events. They carry the emotional residue of catastrophe, collective trauma, and transformation across time, which is why they remain charged long after the immediate historical references have receded.
His approach is rooted in synaesthesia. What appears visually fragmented is often organised sonically beneath the surface. Each brushstroke and colour carries its own sonic register — heavy industrial roars, flickering chimes, digital interference, or operatic swells. Banisadr begins a painting by listening to an internal soundscape, then composes until the elements reach a hard-won harmony amid chaos.
His practice balances dualities at the heart of human experience: turbulence and composure, abstraction and figuration, order and chaos. Recent bronze sculptures such as The Alchemist, Animus, Anima, Gilgamesh and Cyclops represent a significant material shift. The decision to work in bronze was prompted by the wave of monument removals around the world, and the question of what it means to make objects of physical permanence in a destabilised historical moment. Banisadr initially approached sculpture as if it were painting, but once he surrendered to the logic of bronze, the works took on a powerful new presence, hovering between the organic, the mechanical, the mythical, and the ethereal.
Temple of the Mind: The Buffalo AKG Exhibition
Temple of the Mind, which opens at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum on 26 June and runs until 8 November 2026, is Banisadr’s first intervention into a museum’s permanent collection. Rather than staging a standalone presentation, he has drawn works from across those holdings and placed them in direct relation to his own paintings. The exhibition includes a focused installation in the Hemicycle Gallery and extends throughout the Wilmers Galleries, marking the museum’s first-ever artist collection intervention. The title borrows from Albert Pinkham Ryder’s painting The Temple of the Mind, evoking a space where perception, memory, and imagination converge. Works from the collection — Persian miniatures, Goya, Hiroshige woodcuts, Abstract Expressionist energy — are not treated as mere context but as active presences within the same visual field. For a painter whose practice is built on the permeability of cultural boundaries, the format extends rather than departs from his work.
This builds on the momentum of his first major U.S. museum survey, The Alchemist, which opened at the Katonah Museum of Art in March 2025 and is currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg until 12 July 2026, before travelling to the Rose Art Museum in 2027 and the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte, NC, in Summer 2027. The exhibition brought together nearly twenty years of painting, drawing, printmaking, and his debut sculptures, and is accompanied by a major monograph from Yale University Press featuring essays by Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe, William H. Sherman, and Gražina Subelytė, along with a conversation between Banisadr and Robert Storr.
Craft, Collection, and Cultural Standing
Banisadr’s work is held in permanent collections at the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Hirshhorn Museum, and LACMA. He is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellowship and was named No. 1 Artist of the Year by Flash Art in 2011. He is represented internationally by Perrotin, Thaddaeus Ropac, Victoria Miro, and Olney Gleason, galleries whose programmes reflect the institutional and international reach his work has acquired.
In conversation with The Exclusivist, the artist reflects on sound, memory, painting, sculpture, and perception as interconnected forces shaping his practice.
Q&A with Ali Banisadr
Evolution of Sound
It’s well known that your paintings begin with sound, but how has that sonic language evolved? When you listen to the “sound” of your 2025–2026 paintings, especially works like Leviathan, what feels different from a decade ago? Has the auditory character of your work shifted in ways that reflect your internal landscape as much as the external noise of the world?
In recent years, I’ve become deeply interested in studying music more seriously to better understand how a musical composition is constructed — its underlying architecture, rhythm, movement, tension, and why certain structures emotionally resonate. At the same time, I’ve also become somewhat of an audiophile, which has allowed me to experience sound in a more sculptural and spatial way.
This has deepened my understanding of the relationship between sound and visual language, and I can see that evolution reflected in the newer paintings. The works have become more layered rhythmically and structurally, almost orchestral, where different forms and energies move simultaneously yet remain connected through an invisible internal composition.
A decade ago, the sound in my paintings felt more instinctive and explosive. Now there is still turbulence, but it is accompanied by a greater awareness of pacing, silence, repetition, and intervals — much like music itself. I think this shift also reflects both my internal landscape and the overwhelming external noise of the world we live in today. The paintings attempt to absorb these psychological, historical, and emotional frequencies and transform them into something visual.
Unexpected Pairings in Temple of the Mind
In Temple of the Mind at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, you’re curating a direct dialogue between your paintings and works from the museum’s collection. What was the most unexpected pairing you made, and did any of those conversations shift or even unsettle how you understand your own practice?
I prefer to describe this project as an intervention rather than a curatorial exercise. Curating often involves organising works through historical narratives or contextual similarities surrounding their production. My interest here is different. I am more interested in the psychological and symbolic relationships these works have with my own thinking and image-making process.
The works I selected feel less like historical objects and more like portals or psychic doorways into different ways of understanding images. I’ve always been fascinated by the migration of symbols and archetypes across cultures and time — how certain forms continue to reappear, transform, and survive within the collective imagination. In a sense, the works in the exhibition are all floating within the “temple of my mind,” participating in an ongoing dialogue with one another.
Some of the most unexpected pairings revealed surprising emotional or energetic connections rather than formal similarities. Those encounters reinforced for me that images are living entities; they continue to evolve through time and through the minds of those who encounter them.
Sonic Dimension of Bronze
Your new bronze sculptures, The Alchemist, Animus, Anima, Gilgamesh and Cyclops landmark a major expansion into three dimensions. Did translating your visual world into bronze introduce a different kind of sonic experience, something more physical, vibrational, or material, or does sound operate differently for you in sculpture than in painting?
Yes, absolutely. Sculpture occupies space very differently than painting. A painting creates an illusionistic space, whereas sculpture physically exists within our world and shares space with us. Because of that, I experience sculpture as carrying a different kind of vibration or sonic presence.
We move around sculptures rather than simply looking into them, so their energy unfolds circularly, almost like a hypnotic frequency moving through space. The experience becomes more physical and bodily.
The actual process of making sculpture also feels very different. Working with clay involves pressure, resistance, touch, gravity — your hands are almost collaborating with the material in order to allow the form to emerge. There is something ancient and ritualistic about that process which I find deeply meaningful.
I often think of these sculptures as talismans or archetypal presences that have surfaced from another psychological or mythological realm into ours.
Unseen Architecture
Your paintings create dense, immersive worlds, yet there is an underlying architecture that never becomes visible. What role does unpainted or unarticulated space play in shaping the final work, and what might people be surprised to learn about how that hidden structure operates?
Over the past several years, architectural elements have increasingly entered my work as a way of structuring and breaking apart space. In some ways, this relates to the Cubists or even Persian miniature painting, where multiple spatial systems coexist simultaneously within a single image.
For me, painting is always about constructing an internal architecture that guides the viewer’s eye through the work. Even in moments that appear chaotic or improvised, there is usually an invisible structural framework holding the painting together.
What may surprise people is how much of the painting depends on what remains unresolved or partially hidden. The visible image is only one layer. Beneath it are rhythms, directional forces, erased gestures, and underlying geometries that continue to shape the final composition subconsciously.
I think of the geometric language and the biomorphic energy of the paintings as existing in constant dialogue with one another — almost like tectonic pressures shifting beneath the architecture of the painting.
Where It Stands
Banisadr’s dense and turbulent early canvases have expanded into increasingly layered and visually rich worldscapes, with parallel explorations in drawing, printmaking, and bronze sculpture. He belongs to a rare category of artists whose work records its historical moment not by depicting events, but by capturing the sensation of living through them. Sensory overload, competing temporalities, distributed meaning, and alchemical transformation are not surface effects but the very architecture of his practice, and that depth is what gives the work its staying power.
Ali Banisadr Official Website | Instagram
Representation: Perrotin | Thaddaeus Ropac | Victoria Miro | Olney Gleason
