Amir H. Fallah

Amir H. Fallah’s graphic, exuberant figurative paintings reflect on the artist’s notion of identity, his personal Iranian-American heritage and childhood memories, and generational experiences that arise from migration, displacement, trauma and assimilation. Traces of the vocabulary and touchstones of classical Western portraiture can be found in the compositions of his paintings, which are rich with imagery and allegory. Often, Fallah’s figures hold modern objects of communication or visualisation, such as telephones and cameras, which are pertinent in their anachnronisity within the worlds Fallah creates. While the artist does not include the facial likeness of his figures, their personhood, ancestry and cultural histories are represented through these scattered, disorientated objects, and the ornate lexicon of symbols that surround them.