Repost from @thaddaeusropac
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On view at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, Florida: Ali Banisadr, The Alchemist
Encompassing nearly twenty years of the artist’s singular practice, from 2006 to the present, The Alchemist’ presents works across the mediums of painting, sculpture, drawing and printmaking.
The exhibition reveals Banisadr’s artistic practice as a careful balancing act between chaos and composure, and abstraction and representation. His images display a mastery of art history, philosophy and world events, offering a nuanced perspective of human nature. The works are rich with figurative illusions rooted in autobiographical narratives, sonic recollection, invented stories, world history, collective memory and mythology.
Visit the exhibition at @mfastpete until 12 July 2026.
@simorgh3 #AliBanisadr
#MFAStPete
#ThaddaeusRopac
Images/video: 1. Video by Pushpin Films. 2 & 4. Ali Banisadr, These fragments I have shored against my ruins, 2023. Oil on linen. 218.4 x 457.2 cm (86 x 180 in). 3. Ali Banisadr, The Alchemist, installation view, Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, 2026 (repost).
#alibanisadr #stpetersburgfl
Repost from @princetonuniversityartmuseum
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Join us for an Artist Panel April 23! Artists Ali Banisadr and Terry Winters, part of the generations of artists who have been influenced by Willem de Kooning’s revolutionary paintings, will discuss what motivates their work and how the questions that animated de Kooning’s practice in the mid-twentieth century still endure today.
Moderated by John Elderfield and Mitra Abbaspour, curators of the exhibition Willem de Kooning: the Breakthrough Years 1945–50, and introduced by Chief Curator Juliana Ochs Dweck at @princetonuniversityartmuseum
#alibanisadr #dekooning #princetonuniversityartmuseum @mma211
This event is free and open to the public.
🔗 Learn more by tapping to the events calendar, linked in our bio!
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Ali Banisadr. Photography by Lisa Kato. Courtesy of Plus Magazine.
Terry Winters. Photo by Hendel Teicher
We’re honored to be featured in @nytimes in “What to See This Spring at Museums Across the Country.” ✨
“Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist” at the MFA highlights the artist’s richly layered work, shaped by his childhood in Tehran during the Iran–Iraq War and his experience of synesthesia—where sound and memory transform into vivid visual language. As noted, his paintings bring together “colors and shapes” that echo aural memories of a war-torn landscape, creating dynamic, immersive worlds.
On view through July 12. Plan your visit: mfastpete.org
#MFAStPete #AtTheMFA #AliBanisadr #NYTimes #ArtExhibition StPeteEvents
“Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist” is organized by the Katonah Museum of Art. Curated by Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe, Director and Chief Curator, Katonah Museum of Art. Generous support provided by Art Bridges.
“Al-Kīmiyā: The Art of Transformation“ @artbasel Qatar at @perrotin M208 until Feb 7th.
The exhibition’s sculptural works extend these concerns into three dimensions. Cast in bronze from maquettes originally formed from clay, bark, branches, and plaster, figures such as Gilgamesh, Cyclopes, Animus, Anima, and The Alchemist appear at once ancient and futuristic—talismanic protectors for an unstable age. Gilgamesh draws from Banisadr’s sustained engagement with the ancient epic poem, while Cyclopes collapses Homeric myth with science fiction, recalling both Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odysseyand the unblinking eye of HAL, an emblem of artificial intelligence and technological omniscience. Animus and Anima reference Carl Jung’s archetypal binaries, proposing psychic duality not as opposition but as coexistence.
In The Alchemist, vulnerability itself becomes transformative: a figure mid-metamorphosis, surrendering to elemental forces as parts of the body turn to gold. Across all media, Banisadr’s works function as mnemonic devices—pricks to collective memory—reminding viewers of a shared humanity rooted in earth, ritual, and imagination, even as contemporary life drifts toward abstraction and simulation. Al Kimia ultimately proposes transformation not as rupture, but as continuity: an ongoing dialogue between myth and technology, nature and culture, darkness and illumination—where visual chaos may signal, paradoxically, a cosmic order yet to come.
#alibanisadr #artbasel #artbaselqatar @wael_shawky #alkimia #perrotin
‘The Moon Watchers’ by Ali Banisadr is a work on paper combining pastel, charcoal, and ink, currently on view at Art Basel Qatar.
Here, gestural mark- making collides with X-ray–like imagery, evoking the tension between the organic and the machinic.
Banisadr’s subtle engagement with technology—present throughout his practice—points to the ways digital systems reshape perception and visual culture. The image operates as a threshold: “When the soul wants to experience something,” Banisadr notes, “it throws out an image in front of it and then steps into it.” Images are not data but living carriers of possibility—symbolic seeds that migrate across time and cultures, echoing the thinking of art historian Aby Warburg and Banisadr’s own rhizomatic research practice.
We invite you to visit Al-Kīmiyā: The Art of Transformation at our booth, on view through February 7.
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@simorgh3@artbasel #AliBanisadr #ArtBaselQatar #Perrotin
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Ali BANISADR, The Moon Watchers, 2026
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
“When poets awake, it becomes night” 2026 @artbasel Qatar @perrotin M208 until Feb 7
When poets awake, it becomes night (2026) depicts a gathering in a forest under a wolf moon, inspired by an experience hiking with Banisadr’s children through a snowy, nocturnal landscape. The painting began outdoors, its initial marks made with branches directly on canvas. The forest appears as both primordial site and psychic threshold—inhabited by shamanic figures that echo the painter himself. For Banisadr, the forest exists just beyond the boundaries of consciousness: a place where instinct overtakes orientation, yet also the reservoir from which civilization itself is built. Poetry, like painting, becomes a vehicle for expressing what cannot be documented or photographed— phenomena accessible only through lived experience and symbolic form.
#alibanisadr #artbaselqatar #doha #perrotin
Repost from @perrotin
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Ali Banisadr is presenting ‘Al-Kīmiyā: The Art of Transformation’ at Art Basel Qatar.
On this occasion, the artist presents an exhibition unfolding across painting, sculpture, and works on paper, examining humanity’s enduring drive toward becoming—toward change, mutation, and renewal.
Most of the works in the exhibition are nocturnal where moons rise over winter landscapes; figures gather in forests; storms churn unseen. Night, for Banisadr, is not the absence of vision but a condition in which transformation becomes possible—where consciousness loosens, symbols migrate, and latent structures surface.
🗓️ Until February 7
📍M208
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@simorgh3@artbasel #AliBanisadr #ArtBaselQatar #Perrotin
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Exhibition views of Art Basel Qatar, Doha, 2026
Photo: Ismail Noor
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
We are thrilled to take part in the first edition of Art Basel Qatar with a solo presentation by Ali Banisadr.
At the center of the exhibition will be ‘The Scribe’ (2026), a large-scale painting that will depict a Shakespearean, hybrid figure—half person, half paint—suspended within a hallucinatory space.
The work embodies a dual identity Banisadr recognizes in himself: thinker and painter, scholar and dreamer. Historically, the scribe is a preserver of information; here, the role expands. This figure does not merely record but revises, challenges, and extends knowledge.
Banisadr’s conception is informed by his long-standing engagement with medieval Islamic polymaths associated with the House of Wisdom in Baghdad—figures such as Averroes, Ibn Sina, and Al-Hazan— whose work translated, corrected, and transformed Greek philosophy through experimentation and inquiry.
The exhibition will span paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, and will be on view at our booth M208 through February 7.
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@simorgh3@artbasel #AliBanisadr #ArtBaselQatar #Perrotin
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Ali BANISADR, The Scribe, 2026
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
When I was in Vienna I did a post about the details in Bosch’s Last Judgment, and so here I’m doing a post about the details in @simorgh3 (Ali Banisadr)’s recent series of painting which were on view at @olneygleason in a wonderful show that closed yesterday called “Noble/Savage.” I’m pretty sure Ali is a bit tired of the comparisons, but both he and Bosch play with a concept of composition in which the small moralistic/mythological figures are largely divorced from the overall composition of the larger painting—they form little nodes of activity that are narratives in their own right, and if they are incorporated into the wider painting, it’s as part of an abstract composition—I’d posit this as in distinction to Bruegel the Elder for example, or Poussin. Anyways. I had a wonderful time finding these figurative little collections of brushstrokes within the wider maelstrom that Ali creates.
