Amir H. Fallah: Remember My Child...
September 12 – October 31, 2020
Shulamit Nazarian
One of the most fascinating figurative painters working today, Amir H. Fallah brings a sense of graphic design—a skill he picked up from founding, editing, and publishing the DIY lifestyle zine-turned-magazine Beautiful Decay from 1996 (when he was just sixteen) until 2013—to his rich, visual narratives. Creating biographical portraits from the things people own, he merges a knowledge of Western art and culture with the pattern-based language of Islamic art to construct something completely fresh and spirited. In his new series of large-scale paintings, the Iranian-American artist explores the immigrant experience through the personal histories of his family to construct life lessons to pass down to his young son.
“Each painting starts with a line of text and that line of text is my starting point for finding imagery—the iconography to use in the painting,” Fallah explained in a recent video for the COLA 2020 Artist Focus Series. “Everyday I started this practice of sitting down at our dining room table, which is now covered in plastic—a kind of makeshift art studio—and my son and I will have some creative projects to do. I’ll start making these small works on paper that are based on some of the sketches that I have for the larger paintings and he will do some sort of art and craft project. It’s been really interesting because so much of the work is about raising a child and passing on your values to him.”
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