Hadi Alijani
Painting is a way of seeing the surrounding world. Through it, I try to reconstruct my personal narratives of contemporary events in Iran and the world.
— Hadi Alijani
Selected Works
The Mutilated Gaze
Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to announce The Mutilated Gaze, an exhibition of new works by Paris-based, Iranian artist Hadi Alijani. For his U.S. debut and first exhibition with the gallery, Alijani presents a group of six new acrylic on canvas still-life paintings. The exhibition will be on view from November 9 through December 21, 2024.
With unexpected dimensions and compressed forms, Alijani creates a visual lexicon ripe with subtle humor and artistic sensibility. Exaggerated plants, fruit, fish, and ameoba-like creatures hang suspended in the air or aslant architectural features. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional perspectives are turned upside down, alerting the viewer to the tension between the objects within their compositions. Alijani describes this stylistic synthesis as: “a contact zone resulting from the collision of Eastern and Western perspectives to reach a coherent and separate whole.” He further elaborates: “Painting is a way of seeing the surrounding world. Through it, I try to reconstruct my personal narratives of contemporary events in Iran and the world.”
Alijani’s paintings offer a host of art historical references, most prominent among them Qajar paintings, seen in works by Kamal-ol-Molk and Mirza Baba. The invention of photography in the 19th century had a profound effect on the hierarchy of genres in still-life painting, a direct legacy Alijani embodies here. In one work, the artist recreates the 16th century Safavid Chelsea Carpet to serve as the focal point for an allegorical clash between humans and their effects in society. Above the rug, bumpy squashes undulate atop an octagonal table, while a taxidermied cheetah skin curls halfway out of the picture plane. The top-down view destabilizes easy classifications of perspective and provokes a thornier critique. “In the Qajar period, the still life was a symbol of strength and power of the kingdom,” explains Alijani. “In this work, the deformation of still life deprive the painting of royal strength and glory.”
Other compositions in the show lean further into questions of the viewer’s position in the painting. A folding knife renders a watermelon’s flesh jagged, but there is no hand to fashion it shut. Alijani is suggestive of a human gaze, albeit one which is “mutilated” and in pronounced absence of figuration. Upon visiting an exhibition of Persian miniatures and carpets in Munich in 1910, Henri Matisse remarked: "Persian miniatures showed me the possibility of my sensations. That art had devices to suggest a greater space, a really plastic space." This is one way of understanding the centuries-long cultural exchange between Iran and Europe, which artist Hadi Alijani reframes in his signature style.
About the Artist
Born 1987, Sari, Iran
Lives and works in Paris, France
Download full CV
Hadi Alijani (b. 1987) is an artist based in Paris. He received his BA in Painting from the University of Shahed. Building on the art historical dialogue between Iran and Europe, Alijani’s fantastical compositions synthesize Persian iconography, surrealist humor, and everyday images into rich, vibrant landscapes laden with personal and historical meaning. In 2022, Alijani completed a residency at Southway Studio in Pavilion Southway, Marseille, France. Recent exhibitions include In search of Lost Space, Southway Studio, Marseille, France; A History of Fantasy: Part II, Cob Gallery, London, UK; and In Search of Lost Space, Assar Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran. Alijani will open his U.S. debut solo exhibition with Michael Kohn Gallery in the Fall of 2024.