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Amir H. Fallah: A Stranger In Your Home

Past exhibition
23 September - 4 November 2017
  • Overview
  • Works
  • Installation Views
  • Press
Overview
Amir H. Fallah, A Stranger In Your Home

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present A Stranger In Your Home, a series of new works by Amir H. Fallah. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

 

Working with the diverse immigrant community in his home city of Los Angeles, the artist creates portraits that investigate feelings of being an outsider in the very place you call home. In these paintings, Fallah deftly integrates both personal and collective narratives. Against the backdrop of a growing national sentiment that immigrants do not belong in this country, he mines the precarity of belonging in the United States.

 

 

Over the past decade, Fallah’s work has probed the history of Western portraiture. With saturated, artificial skin tones and banal-yet-elevated objects, his portraits display a Pop Art sensibility towards material culture. In this series, subjects perform historically loaded poses and gestures: Vibrant limbs of yellow and orange emerge from meticulously layered textiles, developing characters that are purposefully ambiguous. Charged with symbolism from countries and cultures left behind, the paintings suggest how stories outlive their physical hosts by also depicting the heirlooms that survive lifetimes of movement, trauma, and celebration.

 

Borrowing from the legacy of Persian miniatures, Fallah employs flattening and stacking within his compositions rather than creating an illusionistic sense of space. Geometric abstractions and lush swaths of flora form ornate, arabesque margins around his subjects, calling attention to the geopolitical and psychological space of borders. A new series of botanical paintings frame space with entangled ropes of jewelry, family photos, and vines, allowing viewers to project their own images onto vivid voids of color. By fusing the vernacular of Western portraiture with visual motifs found in Islamic art, Fallah’s paintings speak to his own hybridity as an Iranian immigrant.

 

A Stranger In Your Home also includes the installation Embracing the World, a domestic structure that houses the artist’s stained and fused glass self-portrait, which was made in collaboration with Judson Studios in Los Angeles. This installation features an audio recording of Fallah’s parents recounting the narrative of their own immigration from Iran to the United States. Oscillating in tone between documentary and mythology, Fallah’s works speak to the paradoxical placelessness that frequently defines the immigrant experience.

 

Works
  • Amir H. Fallah Genealogy, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 48 inches
    Amir H. Fallah
    Genealogy, 2017
    Acrylic on canvas
    72 x 48 inches
  • Amir H. Fallah Embracing the World, 2017 Stained Glass, Fused Glass, custom LED light panel, walnut frame 32.2 x 42 inches
    Amir H. Fallah
    Embracing the World, 2017
    Stained Glass, Fused Glass, custom LED light panel, walnut frame
    32.2 x 42 inches
  • AMIR H. FALLAH Split Between Far Away Lands, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 48 x 48 inches
    AMIR H. FALLAH
    Split Between Far Away Lands, 2017
    Acrylic on canvas
    48 x 48 inches
  • Amir H. Fallah Young Pioneers, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 48 inches
    Amir H. Fallah
    Young Pioneers, 2017
    Acrylic on canvas
    60 x 48 inches
  • AMIR H. FALLAH Life's Epic Poem, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 48 inches
    AMIR H. FALLAH
    Life's Epic Poem, 2017
    Acrylic on canvas
    60 x 48 inches
  • Amir H. Fallah A Path Set in Stone, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 96 inches
    Amir H. Fallah
    A Path Set in Stone, 2017
    Acrylic on canvas
    68 x 96 inches
  • Amir H. Fallah A Hunger For Which You Can't Have, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 68 x 82 inches
    Amir H. Fallah
    A Hunger For Which You Can't Have, 2017
    Acrylic on canvas
    68 x 82 inches
  • AMIR H. FALLAH Anar, 2017 Acrylic and collage on canvas 48 x 36 inches
    AMIR H. FALLAH
    Anar, 2017
    Acrylic and collage on canvas
    48 x 36 inches
  • AMIR H. FALLAH What We Left Behind, 2017 Acrylic and collage on canvas over panel 40 x 30 inches
    AMIR H. FALLAH
    What We Left Behind, 2017
    Acrylic and collage on canvas over panel
    40 x 30 inches
Installation Views
Press
  • Juxtapoz Magazine: Amir H. Fallah's Art and Intervention

    Gabe Scott, Juxtapoz, December 1, 2017
  • Amir H. Fallah. A Hunger For Which You Can't Have, 2017

    Flaunt: Amir h. fallah presents his first solo exhibition, "a stranger in your home": his art and our thoughts

    Shana Nys Dambrot, FLAUNT, September 25, 2017
  • Amir H. Fallah. Split Between Faraway Lands, 2017

    Art Asia Pacific: Amir H. Fallah's A Stranger In Your Home

    JENNIFER S. LI, Art Asia Pacific, December 1, 2016

Related artist

  • AMIR H. FALLAH

    AMIR H. FALLAH

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Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles

616 N La Brea Ave

Los Angeles, CA 90036

 

info@shulamitnazarian.com

310.281.0961

Open by appointment only

 

 

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