AMIR H.
FALLAH

As a young painter, Amir H. Fallah M.F.A. ’05 found UCLA’s program a bit … intimidating. Towering figures of the Los Angeles art scene — people like Lari Pittman, Catherine Opie, the late John Baldessari — would often pop into the studio and review students’ work. And then offer contradictory feedback. There were two options: feel defeated, or feel inspired. Fallah chose well.

Based in Los Angeles, Fallah was born in Tehran in 1979, a year of revolution and political upheaval that ultimately brought his family to the U.S. His works in the last few years reflect this early encounter with war, migration, and the ways identities are obscured, mutable, and multifaceted.

Denny Gallery, based in New York and Hong Kong, hit a homerun with its spectacular exhibition of Tehran-born, Los Angeles–based artist Amir H. Fallah, known for his vibrant and confrontational paintings, sculptures, and public art.

Mr. Fallah was 4 when he left Iran after its revolution. Now, he’s using his art to support the recent uprising there. Now a contemporary artist based in Los Angeles, Mr. Fallah makes richly ornamental works that merge his two worlds. They combine the themes and patterns found in Persian myths, miniatures, and carpets with motifs from Western pop culture, cartoons and graphics.

Amir Fallah draws on a rich mixture of sources, from Persian miniatures to children’s books, botanical illustrations, maps, and textile patterns to compose his vibrant, maximalist paintings.

L.A.-based Iranian American artist Amir H. Fallah (b. 1979) will be using an image of a woman’s face inside of a sun–a visual once seen on the Iranian flag–as the centerpiece of an art project he intends to keep the ongoing humanitarian crisis there in the consciousness of Americans.

Beyond the Fowler exhibition, Fallah will also be having two other visible projects around LA to coincide with Frieze week, making the winter something of a Fallah-palooza. In February he’s opening an exhibit of new paintings at Shulamit Nazarian, called “A War on Wars,” which he sees as a “meditation on all the horrible things of war, not just in Iran.”

Amir H. Fallah’s beautiful objects reflect a shadow side, a decay of borders, trust, and stability that comes with the trauma of immigration.

Los-Angeles based artist Amir H. Fallah has always taken the “more-is-more” approach to painting. “I really just try to cram everything in there that I can,” he says.

Across painting, sculpture, stained glass, and textiles — all bursting with an intoxicating overload of rich, fine detail, chromatic adventurism, personal, cultural, and geopolitical symbolism, and art historical wit — Amir H. Fallah investigates persistent questions of identity, intimacy, biography, knowledge, duty of care, diaspora, and legacy.

The threads that connect
Amir H. Fallah to his Iranian heritage are woven throughout his works, but the Los Angeles-based artist is just as likely to draw inspiration from 1980s skateboard graphics, vintage fashion illustrations and his son’s storybooks as from Persian manuscripts.

Katie Alice Fitz Gerald opened the Hong Kong branch of New York’s Denny Gallery in 2019, just as the city was hit by protests against a proposed extradition bill, then the pandemic. She held a major show of Iranian-American artist Amir H Fallah’s works there at the height of the city’s Omicron outbreak, when the government imposed its toughest social distancing restrictions.

Los-Angeles based artist Amir H. Fallah has always taken the “more-is-more” approach to painting. “I really just try to cram everything in there that I can,” he says. It stands to reason, then, that his first institutional solo exhibition in the city feels like a love letter to maximalism itself, a meditation on the electric noise of an increasingly interconnected age.

Shulamit Nazarian gallery throws an opening reception for two new exhibits, Amir H. Fallah’s A War on Wars and Naama Tsabar’s Breaks and Suspensions. 616 N. La Brea Ave.

Among the sculptures that particularly struck me were Tony Matelli's Weed (2023), a sculpture of a plant sprouting from the crack between wall and floor in the gallery, Zemer Peled's gorgeous cobalt blue plates, Tony Berlant's printed tin work, Amir H. Fallah's sculpture Forgive and Forget (2022), and a 1947 limited edition copy of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal illustrated by Henri Matisse and a small bronze sculpture by Deborah Butterfield of one of her signature horses but with flowers emanating from within the form.

In Amir H. Fallah’s first museum exhibition in Los Angeles, expect to get caught up in the artist’s maximalist paintings and stained glass works. Fallah is known for making “alternative” portraits [...]

Amir H. Fallah turns western portraiture on its head in his first solo Los Angeles museum exhibition. His striking subjects are rendered in vibrant orange skin tones, subtly positioning them outside an artist’s traditional skin colour palette, and complicating the viewer’s assumptions about the racial or ethnic identities of the sitters.

All of my art starts from a very personal place. In a lot of ways, the work is autobiographical, dealing with me coming to terms with being an immigrant in America, being a refugee in America and straddling two cultures, one very conservative, the other one very liberal. One very old, one very new.

As for many of us, the highlights of lockdown for artist Amir H. Fallah were mealtimes and receiving packages containing online shopping—the latter event so much so, it sparked the idea behind his first exhibition in Hong Kong, Joy as an Act of Resistance at the newly opened Denny Dimin Gallery in Wong Chuk Hang.

Amir H. Fallah is a painter who has advocated for a more rigorous discourse around the digital art associated with NFTs, and brings a knowledge, training, and appreciation for the materiality of a medium to his digital images

In this week’s edition of the podcast, we chat with artist Amir H. Fallah. First, Amir explains why he believes it is important for artists to openly discuss their experiences navigating the art world. Then, he shares some guiding principles that help him manage several aspects of his career.

For several months, Fallah and his partner would take turns structuring their work days around their son's care needs. With his partner working largely from home, Fallah found himself practicing art at the dining room table in a busy, full house.

In past work, Fallah has explored the traditional conventions of portraiture while masking his subjects’ physical characteristics. All of his work begins with ideas of portraiture, but his aim is taking portraiture’s history and expanding on it, manipulating it, distorting it.

Amir H. Fallah’s latest show, “Better a Cruel Truth Than a Comfortable Delusion,” on view at Denny Dimin through February 20, is inspired by his young son’s bedtime stories, but it still tackles hot-button issues such as racism, abuses of power, greed, and climate change.

Amir H. Fallah’s show, “Better a Cruel Truth Than a Comfortable Delusion,” is currently on view at Denny Dimin Gallery in New York. The new paintings imagined as a how-to manual for Fallah’s son, featuring icons, imagery, and references to the culture that forms us—from advertising and pop culture to the books we read as children.

The works of Iranian-born, American artist Amir H. Fallah are largely an exploration of how history and cultures and, by extension, personal and collective identities and our relationship with others are constructed and received.

The eclectic fields of Amir H. Fallah's paintings expand traditional notions of portraiture. Instead of spelling out a person's individuality, Fallah draws from Western painting vocabularies, vernacular imagery, along with details from his native Iran, including aspects from Persian miniature painting, to evoke stories of migration, celebration, and trauma.

Amir H. Fallah’s paintings of cloaked figures in sumptuous interiors celebrate the possibilities of domesticity.

All of the artwork selected for the exhibition draws inspiration from the present moment and the pressing issues of this year. Amir H. Fallah, a Los Angeles-based artist, was delighted to take part in the exhibition and identifies its power to disseminate art in the public realm. “What really excites me about [public art] is there is a chance to have a dialogue with people who otherwise would not be able to see artwork,” Fallah said. Fallah said that while art may not normally be at the forefront of people’s minds, displaying the exhibition on buses invites public attention and discussion.

At Shulamit Nazarian in Hollywood, Amir H. Fallah’s new paintings cull references from various histories and cultures to create compositions that read like narrative tapestries.

For this bright and imaginative solo show, Amir H. Fallah wondered what portraiture would look like without a portrait. Made for his five-year-old son, the portraits collect a father and son’s shared memories of children’s stories, movies, and more.

ICA San Jose commissioned the mural by Amir H. Fallah, titled “Remember This” and invited its board members to become poll workers. The vote plane cost $10,400, part of a $500,000 advertising campaign by the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters.

The year of the revolution, another future member of Iran’s artistic diaspora was born in Tehran: Amir H. Fallah, a figurative painter now based in Los Angeles. Because of the political turmoil in Iran, Mr. Fallah had a much more unstable childhood.

Three paintings by Amir H. Fallah on view in the Focus section in the booth of New York’s Denny Dimin Gallery.

There are many stories that we have told ourselves in order to make our world make sense. These modern myths range from Columbus’ “discovery” of this continent to the very idea of the American Dream.

What does it mean to paint portraiture without a portrait? Though Amir H. Fallah has spent his career grappling with this very question, his newest series — now on view in the show-stopping exhibition Remember My Child at Shulamit Nazarian — represents a departure from his previous work.

Californian artist Amir H. Fallah will be exhibiting a new series of paintings, entitled A Hybrid Heart, alongside a sound installation and stained glass sculpture. His mesmerising and highly textured works explore alternative narratives around identity.

Known for his maximalist, floral tableaux and portraits of people shrouded by richly patterned fabric and often surrounded by objects referencing their own histories, painter Amir H. Fallah presents a new body of work here that departs from his earlier style.

“I had to turn down four different residencies last year,” artist Amir H. Fallah told me, “my son is four years old and my wife has a full-time job.”

Three large round works feature on the entry wall leading to Remember My Child…, Amir H. Fallah’s current exhibition at Shulamit Nazarian. In each, a sumptuously detailed ring of flowers, plants, and other objects surrounds a central field of vibrant color, evocative of the dome of the heavens.

Painter Amir H. Fallah is the father of a young son, and they love to read stories together. Every culture has its own universe of children’s literature, from myths and fantasy to more quotidian fables and cautionary tales, cartoons, comics[...]

In California, the Institute of Contemporary Art San José will open for voting, with a mural by Amir H. Fallah on display.

Denny Dimin, meanwhile, offers works by Amir H. Fallah. The Iranian-born, California-based artist’s elaborately conceived canvases draw on a range of pictorial traditions, from Persian miniatures to Dutch genre scenes and American Pop.

The 40-year-old artist paints idiosyncratic portraits that unfurl infinite narratives to his audience. Ask him, and he explains that his detail-rich, colour-drenched paintings are a new kind of portrait, one that shows a person without physicality at all.

Amir and I discuss how issues of identity manifest in his painting and daily life, his family’s immigration into the United States from Iran, as well as running a successful studio and surviving as an artist.