About
Oliver Behzadi is an East London-based artist working across painting and photography. Born in Tehran and shaped by early experiences of upheaval and displacement, his practice explores memory, belonging, visibility, and the unstable conditions through which identity is formed. Across abstract paintings, self-portraits, figure paintings, and photographic projects, Behzadi returns to questions of presence: how it is made, withheld, obscured, resisted, and remembered.
At the centre of his work is an act of return. Canvases are revisited, reworked, partially erased, and built upon over extended periods, sometimes across months or years. Earlier gestures remain beneath later interventions, creating surfaces that carry the physical evidence of time. Painting becomes a durational process: a way of thinking through memory, failure, uncertainty, and transformation layer by layer. The work develops through dialogue rather than sequence. Earlier images are not simply completed and left behind; they return as grounds, echoes, interruptions or pressures within later work. An abstract painting may become a site for a figure; a self-portrait may be reworked over a former version of itself; a studio residue may reappear through photography. The practice forms a web of relations, where meaning emerges between works as much as within them.
The abstract paintings emerge through this process of accumulation. Colour, texture, and gesture build into palimpsestic surfaces that resist erasure and refuse easy resolution. Rather than pursuing purity or spontaneity, they hold multiple temporalities at once, making duration visible through material form.
The self-portraits engage the face as a site of recognition and refusal. Often obscured, fragmented, or withheld, the face becomes a place where identity is both sought and resisted. Shaped by displacement and by contemporary systems of visibility — documents, databases, social media, biometric images — these works ask what it means to be seen without being fully captured. Authenticity here is not a fixed inner truth, but a refusal to abandon what remains unresolved, opaque, and unassimilated.
The figure paintings present faceless, standing bodies placed within inherited painted grounds. Neither portraits nor symbols, these figures suggest presence without fixed identity. Their stillness holds a quiet agency: the capacity to remain present within conditions one did not choose. In precarious times, they propose endurance not as heroism, but as the keeping-open of possibility.
Photography extends Behzadi’s attention to residue, labour, and duration. The Shed Project and The Cloth Project focus on the overlooked traces of making — dust, stains, hardened rags, pigment marks, and studio surfaces. These images reflect back on painting, revealing the studio as an archive of gesture, care, and accumulated time.
Beauty is not absent from the work, but it is never allowed to settle into reassurance. The paintings resist the expectation that a canvas should become a pleasing object on a wall. Their grit, awkwardness, and unresolved surfaces disturb that expectation, producing a form of disorientation rather than comfort. What matters is not beauty as an end in itself, but the pressure placed upon it: where it breaks, where it fails, where something less assimilable begins to appear.
Across mediums, Behzadi’s work resists the speed and disposability of contemporary image culture. Painting slows the image down; photography attends to what remains around and after it. Together, the works trace forms of presence that persist under pressure: marks beneath the surface, bodies on uncertain ground, memories that resist disappearance, and selves that refuse to be fully captured.
Trained first in medicine before studying art at City Lit and the Slade School of Fine Art, Behzadi brings sustained attention and material sensitivity to a practice rooted in displacement, memory, and the politics of visibility.