Amir H. Fallah, Painting For An Audience Of One With Lessons For A Lifetime
Chadd Scott
Amir H. Fallah, ‘Dying for Invisible Lines,’ 2020. Acrylic on panel. 36h x 48w in 91.44h x 121.92w AMIR H. FALLAH AND DENNY DIMIN GALLERY NEW YORK
Can a self-portrait reveal nothing of the artist’s appearance? Amir H. Fallah thinks so.
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.
The artist now turns his gaze inward, with a specific purpose and audience in mind.
“In this body of work, I am creating paintings based around life lessons, warnings and allegorical stories that I want to pass onto my 5-year-old son,” Fallah told Forbes.com. “I realized that these life lessons embodied my personal experiences, background and history in a profound way and described me better than any photograph or painting of my likeness ever could. In that sense, they are truly self-portraits of me.”
See for yourself now through February 20 at Denny Dimin Gallery in Tribeca, New York during Fallah’s new exhibition “Better a Cruel Truth Than a Comfortable Delusion.”
Inspired by the children’s books he reads to his son before bed, Fallah’s new self-portraits examine how value systems are taught to children. Drawing on source material and imagery from a wide array of cultures, time periods and aesthetic styles, Fallah creates painted collages ripe with meaning.
Tackling issues of racism, abuses of power, greed, xenophobia and climate change, these paintings are some of Fallah’s most political works to date. He considers them an expansive how-to manual for his son about moral values.
“He is too young to get these works right now. He thinks it’s weird that I’m taking imagery from his story books and sketches and putting them in my paintings, but I think that as he gets older, he will appreciate them,” Fallah said. “I hope to be able to pass along much of the information in the paintings to him in person as I raise him. The paintings function almost as a diary of sorts, something that could point him in the right direction in life if I was to not be around.”
Installation view, Amir H. Fallah, “Better a Cruel Truth Than an Comfortable Delusion” exhibition at Denny Dimin Gallery New York.
An Iranian-American artist based in Los Angeles, Fallah (b. 1979) and his parents came to the United States in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. Fallah is best known for richly detailed portraits of people whose families and identities were similarly formed by immigration, assimilation and otherness.
Fallah planned much of this work prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and completed it over the tumultuous course of 2020. His paintings’ immediacy serve a reminder that the issues which have violently cleaved American over the past year—political extremism, white supremacy, immigration, culture wars, policing—long predate 2020 and Donald Trump.
“Honestly, I wasn’t too surprised by the themes in the paintings coming to a head with current politics,” Fallah said. “America has had issues of racism, xenophobia and injustice for as long as it’s been around. However, the extreme pressures of the pandemic highlighted many of these issues and brought them to a fever pitch all at the same time.”
Each piece in the show originated with a text from a wide range of sources including song lyrics, poetry, film and history. Absolute Power Corrupts, Ideas are Bulletproof, They Will Trick You For Their Own Rewards. These statements are the basis for the imagery and serve as the paintings’ titles.
Amir H. Fallah, ‘Nevermind What’s Been Selling, It’s What You’re Buying,’ 2020. Acrylic on panel. AMIR H. FALLAH AND DENNY DIMIN GALLERY NEW YORK
The painting Nevermind What’s Been Selling, It’s What You’re Buying is one example of how breaking news appeared in his paintings by coincidence. Fallah grew up in the Washington D.C. area and would attend NFL games there, where the local team had a contentious nickname.
“I remember at an early age thinking that the name ‘Redskins’ and their logo was extremely offensive and couldn’t figure out why a football team had that name,” Fallah said. “In the painting, the Redskins logo is painted upside down –it’s an S.O.S. signal of sorts, similar to images of the American Flag being flown upside down.”
Fallah sketched the painting almost two years ago and was just finishing it as the team announced this summer it would finally dump the name.
“I wasn’t sure if the team’s owner would ever own up to the racist history of the name and logo,” Fallah admits. “It was in incredible coincidence that energized the painting and gave it a whole new meaning for me.”
Amir H. Fallah, ‘Ideas are Bulletproof,’ 2020. Acrylic on panel. 36h x 36w in 91.44h x 91.44w cm. AMIR H. FALLAH AND DENNY DIMIN GALLERY NEW YORK
Fallah remembers little of his homeland. His family left Iran when he was four, first moving to Turkey and then Italy before arriving in America at age seven. Iran and the Middle East are readily apparent in his paintings, however. From Islamic patterns to Middle Eastern flags, figures and imagery, Fallah’s work takes on an international, exotic flavor.
“I’ve always thought of myself as a cultural hybrid, a chameleon of sorts; I fit in nowhere and everywhere at once,” Fallah said. “America’s issues with Iran don’t affect me on a day-to-day basis, but America’s sanctions against Iran hurt many of my relatives.”
Both of Fallah’s grandmothers used to regularly visit family in Los Angeles prior to 2017. In that year, President Trump instituted the first of what would become a series of sweeping travel bans. Iran was among the first countries to have most citizens barred from entry. The bans overwhelmingly targeted nations with heavy Muslim populations.
“It’s painful to know that they will never meet their great grandson because of Trump,” Fallah said. “I don’t see how two 85-year-old women are any danger to America.”
These sentiments make their way into the artist’s work.
“The painting Dying For Invisible Lines, Killing For Invisible Gods deals with not only my own history of immigration, assimilation, but also the horrible abuses that the Trump Administration has brought on to immigrants at the Mexico border,” Fallah said. “As a parent, I can’t imagine having my kid taken away from me and don’t understand how anyone in power could be so cold and ruthless.”
Explaining that to his son one day won’t be easy.
