Amir H. Fallah
Fowler Museum at UCLA
29 January – 14 May

Amir H. Fallah, Protector 1, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 1.8 × 1.2 m. Courtesy: the artist and Ginsberg Family Collection

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. The figures themselves are also ambiguously rendered, represented without faces but instead with their heads covered by patterned textiles. A number of these paintings, such as Protector 1 (2022), also feature grid-like structures with patterned geometric lines moving between planes to create a shape that evokes everything from the work of M.C. Escher to Islamic abstract art. Fallah combines markers of his Iranian-American identity to explore ideas of the self along with moral and political concerns. As well as paintings, Fallah makes stained-glass compositions in collaboration with Judson Studios, in which he explores the potential of colour and light. Inquisitive and creative, the artist also explores ways of presenting the self in his steel sculptures that abstract the human form to highlight geometry and pattern. By looking inward, Fallah highlights the porous nature of art as it comes to transcend the borders of geopolitics and culture.