Amir H. Fallah creates paintings, sculptures, and installations that utilize personal history as an entry point to discuss race, representation, the body, and the memories of cultures and countries left behind. Through this process, the artist’s works employ nuanced and emotive narratives that evoke an inquiry about identity, the immigrant experience, and the history of portraiture.
Fallah interrogates systems of representation embedded in the history of Western art. His ornate environments combine visual vocabularies of painting and collage with elements of installation to deconstruct material modes of identity formation. Portraits of veiled subjects capitalize on ambiguity to skillfully weave fact and fiction, while questioning how to create a portrait without representing the physicality of the sitter. While the stories that surround his subjects are deeply personal and are told through the intimate possessions they hold most dear, his work addresses generational immigrant experiences of movement, trauma, and celebration. Fallah wryly incorporates Western art historical references into paintings formally rooted in the pattern-based visual language of Islamic Art. In doing so, his paintings possess a hybridity that reflects his own background as an Iranian-American immigrant straddling cultures.
Fallah received his BFA in Fine Art & Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Selected solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, SD; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR; San Diego Art Institute; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland, KS.
Amir H. Fallah: Remember My Child is currently on view at Shulamit Naazarian, Los Angeles.
Fallah is also currently working on a new 50-foot mural and two large, circular paintings as the inaugural artist for the ICA San José Facade Project, opening October 15, 2020. To coincide with this, the museum will be transformed into a Vote Center for the first time in its 40-year history, and will be open for four days prior to Election Day and allow voters to drop off their ballots and/or cast their votes.
