NADA Miami 2022

Merging references to his Iranian-American heritage with nods to Middle-Eastern art history and Western portraiture, Amir H. Fallah creates paintings, murals, sculptures, and installations that explore systems of representation embedded in the history of Western art. Personal at their core, Fallah’s works reside in the liminal space of being othered, utilizing personal history as an entry point to discuss race, representation, and the memories of cultures and countries left behind.

A continuation of the artist’s interest in defying the expectations of portraiture, Fallah’s hand-painted figurative sculptures on cut-aluminum strategically enlist ambiguity to represent a figure’s personhood, rather than their superficial likeness. The figures, flattened to a narrow plane, stand composed in the anatomically neutral position characteristic of medical treatises and exclude any signifiers of ethnicity, gender, and class. Developed from the artist’s celebrated Veiled Portrait series, the ornate patterns that obscure the sitters in the portraits cover the entirety of the sculptures, while the symbolic objects are solely discernible from the outlines they make in both the positive and negative spaces of the work.

Amir H. Fallah (b. 1979, Tehran, Iran; Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received his BFA in Fine Art & Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. Select solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings SD; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland OR; San Diego ICA; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland KS. In addition, the artist exhibited a year-long installation at the ICA San Jose. In 2009, Fallah was invited to participate in the 9th Sharjah Biennial and he received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2015. Additional grants and awards include the Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago, the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship, and the Artadia grant.

Fallah is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Greece; McEvoy Foundation For The Arts, San Francisco; Nerman Museum, Kansas City; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; and SMART Museum of Art at the University of Chicago; among numerous others. The Fallacy of Borders, Fallah’s first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles, will open at the Fowler Museum in January 2023, followed by his third solo exhibition at Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles in February 2023.