About
Oliver Behzadi was born in Tehran, Iran. He left Iran when he was 14 years old and moved to London at 16 years of age. He lives and works in East London.
Behzadi's early childhood memories were formed by exposure to the Iranian revolution and Iran-Iraq war. His story is one of dislocation and transposition and what it means to become a refugee as a teenager in a strange land.
Behzadi paints to create surfaces and images that are open and generous. He has worked across various genres of painting including abstraction and figuration.
Behzadi's embrace of self-portraiture over the years has been a constant for him; a place of return and departure. Here he reflects on the notion of the inner landscape and its relationship to subjectivity. His self-portraits have become a locus where Otherness takes on the formality of a head and a torso. These become a template for considering colours and gestures, layers and textures, lines and marks.
In self-portraiture, Behzadi alludes to his formal concerns in painting together with his deep sense of what it means to be the Other. Behzadi's self-portraits attempt to represent the self in various guises where a spectrum of appearances is sought and observed over time; reflecting an evolving and fluctuating internal dialogue with the inner self. Indeed, in his self-portraits, Behzadi poses the fundamental question of how to represent the self when one has the identity of the Other. Behzadi's self-portraits essentially, reflect on the passage of time through the manipulation of paint on surface; an activity that is temporal and reflective.
In his figures, Behzadi references a solitary being that finds himself in various environments. With insertion of figure into diverse scenes, Behzadi brings tension to the emerging images. Behzadi's figures are both tragic and comic, serious and light, faceless and expressive.The juxtaposition of various elements in these paintings compels the viewer to reflect on the figure and his environment where he is examined and imagined. Through his multifarious titles for the images, Behzadi considers the figure and his world through a wide lens where he reflects on the complex condition of the figure. Ultimately, in his figure paintings, Behzadi throws an oblique gaze and like a detached observe, he questions and contemplates figure's tragic contemporary condition.
Behzadi's broad approach to painting underscores the potentiality of painting to address various concerns within a practice. Examination of his oeuvre suggests interrelation between surface and depth, the light and the dark, the particular and the universal, the mundane and the profound.
Behzadi's formal approach to painting poses questions about the practice of painting and the language of painting and their relevance to contemporary art practice within the context of an authentic engagement with a creative process. His ongoing commitment to painting reveals a certain tension between what to paint and how to paint. His practice reflects on the condition of a painter working in solitude where a particular vision is intertwined with creativity.
Behzadi embraces the practice of painting by exercising subjectivity in his work and considers the place of painting in contemporary practice after Richter.
Behzadi is conscious of and reflects on the notion of the agency of an artist as a painter. In his persistence in painting, Behzadi comments on an ongoing commitment to a practice that is both limiting and open, nourishing and consuming, sensless and sensical.
Behzadi studied medicine in London and then undertook his artistic studies at City Lit and Slade School of Fine Art.