Ali Banisadr was born in 1976 in Tehran, Iran. He moved to California with his family when he was a child and later attended the School of Visual Arts, New York, until 2005 and the New York Academy of Art, from which he graduated in 2007. He had his first solo exhibition at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects in New York in 2008.
Banisadr’s work is characterised by dream-like, hallucinatory and often chaotic landscapes. This subject matter is inspired by childhood memories, imaginary scenes, the history of painting and sound. Banisadr has synaesthesia (the ability to experience sound visually). As a young boy during the Iran-Iraq War, Banisadr would draw to create a visual understanding of the sounds of explosions and air raids. These internal noises guide his mark making on the canvas and plate to create layered compositions of disordered forms and figures.