Tracing the Traceless

On the occasion of Ali Banisadr’s first US museum survey, The Kasmin Review shares an essay by exhibition curator Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe, recently published in the accompanying catalogue. Below, Mapplethorpe traces nearly 20 years of Banisadr’s practice in painting, drawing, printmaking and, for the first time, sculpture. Thinking through Banisadr’s engagement with the history of art, Mapplethorpe positions Banisadr in a lineage of artists whose works characterize the spirit of their times. Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist remains on view at the Katonah Museum of Art through June 29, 2025, and the catalogue is available for purchase through Yale University Press.

These are precarious times. The world order is in flux, driven by the escalation of sociopolitical conflicts. A sense of civil unrest is exacerbated by the echo chamber of partisan newsfeeds—driven by AI algorithms—which has encouraged new levels of cynicism and mistrust. Global warming has brought on unprecedented earthquakes, fires, floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters. The unease generated by these man-made and natural disruptors—compounded by the rise of misinformation readily available on the internet—engenders a feeling that we are entering the age of the proverbial apocalypse.

In times of crisis, civilizations look to art and artists to make meaning of their circumstances. Images become icons of their epoch. Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, 1830, signaled revolution. Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, 1936, became synonymous with the human suffering of the Great Depression. The Hope portrait of Barack Obama, by Shepard Fairey, 2008, emblematized renewal. Working in the tradition of these momentous artists, Ali Banisadr is emerging as one of the definitive voices of his generation. His visionary practice aligns the personal and the collective to acutely and poetically decipher our tempestuous era. Banisadr’s deft engagement with the history of art positions him alongside artists across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries whose innovative work has characterized the spirit of their times. In his Brainstorm notebook, the artist conceives of art history “as an ever-growing chain. One does not replace the past; one only adds a new link.” 

Banisadr is no stranger to personal and sociopolitical upheaval. His experience growing up amid war and cultural instability and his subsequent decision to live in exile inform all aspects of his practice. Born in Tehran, in 1976, Banisadr was three when the 1979 Revolution upended the country. Shortly thereafter, he was thrust into the chaos of the Iran–Iraq War until his family immigrated to the United States, via Turkey, in 1988. In Tehran, he endured daily bombardments from the safety of his family’s basement shelter. He offset the disjunction of experiencing these attacks as sounds and vibrations in real time, but only witnessing the visual effects after the fact, by transposing the episodes into drawings. He has described this exercise as an attempt to process and control the atrocities around him, and a means of creating a safe space within this precarious existence:

The bombings, the air raids; I witnessed so many ruins and chaos everywhere. When the vibrations and explosions of the air raids occurred, my mother recalls I would make drawings to try to make sense of what was happening. And I think that stays with me even now, where I still see the world as this chaotic, potentially dangerous place. Trying to make sense out of it in a visual way is the only way I can try to understand it.(1)

Banisadr’s early experiences were framed by the constructs of poetry and psychology, the respective vocations of his paternal grandmother and mother. They provided him with a particular set of tools to decipher the world that the artist continues to employ in the present. It was also during this formative period that Banisadr traveled to Rome on a family vacation and saw Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. This encounter impressed upon the artist—an agnostic—the visceral power of visual art and inspired a lifelong affinity to the formal aesthetics of Renaissance painting. He recounted the experience in conversation with John Yau, in 2023:

Looking at it, I kind of went to this place. . . You lose sight of time and who you are. . . I was in this shamanistic, trance state. After this experience, I feel like, maybe not consciously but subconsciously, I understood that art could do that to you. . .  I feel like this thought process of bringing fragments together, maybe it had to do with what I’d experienced growing up. Like you want to piece fragments of the world together to try to make it make sense or to heal or both.(2)

Ali Banisadr is emerging as one of the definitive voices of his generation. His visionary practice aligns the personal and the collective to acutely and poetically decipher our tempestuous era.

Immigrants are adept at piecing together fragments to create a functional whole. The artist in exile is a well-documented figure in the twentieth century: Max Ernst, Arshile Gorky, Nalini Malani, and Ai Weiwei, among many others, use allegory and archetypes from mythology and literature to relay their psychic pain. For Banisadr, the alchemical concept of the Rebis—the unification of opposing qualities depicted as the masculine and feminine—is an archetype that can represent a hybridized identity forged in response to cultural displacement. Taking on the role of émigré at the tender age of twelve, and working to master a foreign language and new customs, honed Banisadr’s ability to discern and embrace alternate perspectives. He takes a holistic view of humanity, without bias or agenda, to parse meaning from current events.

This outsider status also bred a lifelong habit of intense research as a strategy to engage fundamental truths. The artist is a voracious and omnivorous reader of titles that extend across geographies and chronologies and relate to disparate subjects, including magic, the ancient world, medieval and Renaissance master painters, Abstract Expressionism, Jungian psychology, Sufi poetry, and the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, and Athanasius Kircher, among many others. These touchstones find their way onto his research tables and into his notebooks—which are the key to his practice—pages covered with references to Isidorian maps dating from the seventh century, to fifteenth-century astrologers, ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian statuary, Hieronymus Bosch, Paul Cezanne, and Pablo Picasso. Brainstorm, his indexical notebook dating from 2021 to the present, is a well from which he constantly draws inspiration. Its traces recur throughout his oeuvre; the notebook is a personal lexicon of archetypes, themes, and titles through which new worlds are formed and navigated.

Banisadr sees himself as a social critic and scribe, whose paintings at once respond to present, past, and future occurrences. Take for example, Return to Mother, 2022, which at the time of its making was the artist’s largest painting, akin to traditional history paintings in terms of its physical grandeur. The title is a translation of the Sumerian 𒂼𒄄 (ama-gi), the first documented word meaning freedom.(3) Centered within the composition is the symbol for the wheel of life, and emerging from this center is “the spinner” who, according to the artist, is the painting’s narrator and protagonist, and perhaps an avatar for Banisadr himself. This archetype, along with other recurring figures such as The Alchemist, The Seer, and the aforementioned Rebis, exists as part of an indexical collection of portraits that accompany the large narrative paintings. Across the picture plane, masked hybrid characters engage in a battle between order and chaos. To the lower left of the wheel of life, a hooded surrogate for the Statue of Liberty serves as a protector of freedoms, a reference to both ama-gi and the first feminist uprising in Iran, in September 2022, following the death of Mahsa Amini. Here Banisadr’s recognition of the importance of women’s rights in the twenty-first century is contextualized within the age-old quest for freedoms across time and sociopolitical hierarchies.

Banisadr’s political bent came to the fore after his move to San Francisco, in the mid-1990s, when he aligned himself with Bay Area graffiti artists like Barry McGee, who practiced street art as a form of sociopolitical critique. Tagging the urban landscape as an active participant in the scene served as an important prequel to Banisadr’s mature works and his interventions within worlds of his own imagining. This interest also aligns with his fascination with ancient civilizations, rich with their own traditions of graffiti, an affinity he shares with the artist Cy Twombly. Banisadr’s shift from a personal artistic practice into the realm of art as public social discourse inspired him to receive formal artistic training. He received a BFA from the School of Visual Art, in 2005, and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art, in 2007.

The artist’s mature artistic breakthrough was his last graduate school painting, The Center Cannot Hold, 2007. In this work, a bucolic landscape is subsumed by a maelstrom of chaos in fiery red and yellow tones. Banisadr created it after a suite of three charcoal drawings made following a study trip to Normandy earlier that year. His experience on the battlefields brought back flashes of childhood memories that had remained dormant for nearly three decades. The artist’s negotiation between parallel realities in these early works—a reengagement of his experience of warfare and a visceral connection to the historic D-Day battles that occurred forty years earlier—resonates with Carl Jung’s concept of the unconscious and its relationship to the collective unconscious: “The forgotten ideas have not ceased to exist. Although they cannot be reproduced at will, they are present in a subliminal state—just beyond the threshold of recall—from which they can rise again spontaneously at any time, often after many years of apparently total oblivion.”(4)

Jung believed that an aspect of the unconscious mind is engaged with universal ideas and impulses that have been passed down across the centuries, through the collective unconscious, and are accessible through a designated series of twelve core archetypes—the Creator/Artist, Ruler, Sage, Innocent, Explorer, Rebel, Hero, Wizard, Jester, Everyman, Lover, and Caregiver—versions of which are found across Banisadr’s oeuvre. Jung was instrumental to the revival of interest in the ancient practice of alchemy, especially as it aligned with mythological, religious, and cultural parallels. He saw it as a means to understanding the phenomenon of transformation, not only of lead into gold, but also of the self into other. Through their work in the material realm, alchemists discovered personal rebirth as well as a connection between the outer and inner dimensions of the self.

The harnessing of memory, both individual and collective, is essential to the construction of Banisadr’s paintings and his role as a scribe and witness. But memory is mercurial, shapeshifting over time and slipping through the sieve of one’s mind like quicksilver. Quicksilver, or mercury, is one of the seven alchemical metals, an element that transcends solid and liquid states, a metaphor for the fluidity between the realms of heaven and earth, life and death—dichotomies omnipresent in Banidsadr’s work. Alchemists believed that quicksilver was the animating spirit hidden in all matter. It enabled transmutation, which was understood to be essential to transformation. For Jung, and subsequently for Banisadr, alchemical precepts provide a link between past, present, and future, between the microcosm of the inner world and the macrocosm of the external world. References to alchemy appear across the artist’s oeuvre, both as the subject of his work and through references to alchemical symbols in works like Queen of the Night, 2022, Is time an arrow or a wheel?, 2023, and These fragments I have shored against my ruins, 2023, among others.

Banisadr’s interest in Jung has precedent. Perhaps most famously, among painters, Jackson Pollock was devoted to Jungian analysis, which he began in 1934 and continued through the 1940s. Weeks before his death in 1956, he said: “I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge. We’re all of us influenced by Freud, I guess. I’ve been a Jungian for a long time.”(5) A Jungian focus on mythology and anthropology can be interpreted through the archetypal symbolism in Pollock’s early drawings and paintings, exemplified by Bird, 1938–41, and The Moon Woman, 1942. The Moon Woman’s totemic affinity to the protagonist in the French Symbolist Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem “Favors of the Moon” (“image of the fearful goddess, the fateful godmother, the poisonous nurse of all the moonstruck of the world”)(6) has a kinship with Banisadr’s namesake protagonist in Queen of the Night, as does the allusion to alchemical and mystical symbols on the left side of the painting.

Banisadr’s compositions contain a multitude of nuanced subplots within his overarching narratives. Current events are filtered through dreams, myths, symbols, and rituals that are expressed through spectacle and a sense of the carnivalesque that sometimes borders on the grotesque. The Fortune Teller, 2024 and The Land of Miracles, 2024, for instance, exemplify the physically expansive yet compositionally magnified perspective of the artist’s work after 2015. One could almost step into the paintings’ shallow fields of imagery to take part in their surreal narratives. For The Land of Miracles, Banisadr took inspiration from The City Flourishing, Tanabata Festival, No. 73, 1857, by Utagawa Hiroshige, a Japanese painter whose formal precision in regard to compositional structure and color palette Banisadr admires. In the upper quadrant, he quotes Hiroshige’s rosy sunset and fluttering festival flags. Ever democratic with his references, he refers to the Crucifixion in the lower right quadrant. Here Christ is splayed on the cross, robed in red and consumed by fiery golden flames below. Behind him an open window serves as a portal into another dimension, an allusion to the unseen and unknowable realms outside the confines of rationality and consciousness. The open window echoes the threshold in Picasso’s Guernica, 1937—a critical point of reference both formally and conceptually for the artist—from which a disembodied head and arm emerge. The fallen figure lying supine beneath the horse bears a stigmata on his left hand, symbolizing the martyrdom of Christ and the promise of paradise, which, in Banisadr’s painting, refers to the United States. What does it mean to live in the US in the twenty-first century, The Land of Miracles seems to ask. Does it persist as the land of opportunity for the displaced and the disenfranchised? In the top right corner, a diminutive solitary figure recalls The Waste Land and harkens back to Banisadr’s beginnings as an artist. Along the upper right edge of the painting is a copy of the New York Times, the “newspaper of record” with “The Hypocrite” emblazoned on the front page. In this time of misinformation, how does one discern the truth? The reference to newspapers in The Land of Miracles echoes the newsprint covering the body of the dying horse in Guernica. Picasso had been inspired to create this visual anti-war manifesto by photographs of the bombing of Guernica he saw published in various periodicals, including the French newspaper L’Humanité. The depiction of newspaper represents the role that print media, his primary source for information about the horrors of war, played in the painting’s creation.

The Messenger, 2021, painted in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, also alludes to Guernica, though in Banisadr’s rendition the battle is waged within the body, as indicated by the strands of DNA scattered across the picture plane. The dimensions of These fragments I have shored against my ruins, as with many of Banisadr’s more recent works, are based on those of Guernica. The title, taken from T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” refers to the act of artistic creation as an engagement with the past and a means to stave off the chaos and disorder brought on by war. This painting is a cautionary tale of another kind. “In These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” the artist has said, “there are elements of disruption by a foreign entity, which in my mind is a digital entity, such as AI or social media. I have always been interested in the disruption of technology and how it can change us as human beings to become another type of being.”(7) Formally, the painting exemplifies Banisadr’s use of architecture and geometry to construct his compositions. This compositional device began about 2015 and appears in Alchemy and Exterior, where it was inspired in part by the horizontal lines of the rolling metal storefront security gates the artist noticed walking around his Brooklyn neighborhood. In These fragments I have shored against my ruins, receding pink lines at the top center of the picture plane form a futuristic time tunnel, evocative of the 1982 sci-fi film Tron, that draws the viewer into the heart of the painting, as a portal into another universe. In this age of virtual reality, what does it take to build a new world? As the lines between reality and artifice blur, how does one distinguish between the two?

Still Life, 2024, is a poetic work that takes a more equivocal tone, reflecting on the lightness and darkness of human experience. An active and tonally vibrant scene belies the static title. Hybrid figures representing a man and a woman sit at a table in the center of the composition. A fruit plate between them serves as a memento mori, a reminder of the sweetness and fleeting nature of life. Behind this duo to the left, a choir serenades the couple, separated from the central pair by a school of enlarged spermatozoa that allude to the continuation of the life cycle.

Before 2013, Banisadr’s paintings largely centered on battles waged by armies of mostly anonymous characters. More recently, his figures have grown to life-sized proportions. His archetypes have taken on individual personas to reflect the multifaceted elements of human nature. The artist inserts himself into every painting as the seer and witness. During the act of creation, Banisadr retains a fluid relationship between the states of consciousness and unconsciousness that is essential to his working method, a balance he likens to a dance in which the most effective moments are when the painting leads.

“I witnessed so many ruins and chaos everywhere…Trying to make sense out of it in a visual way is the only way I can try to understand it.” —Ali Banisadr

The synesthesia Banisadr experienced as a child remains a fundamental aspect of his process, and he relies on sound and vibration to dictate the underlying structure for the images. The visual trace of an orchestra of rhythm and harmony can be felt through the abstract shapes of his characters. Music, and particularly the work of the Polish composer Fredric Chopin, serves as sonic inspiration, as exemplified in the aquatint etching Cannons Hidden in Roses, 2019. The print was created as an homage to Chopin, who himself lived in exile, and is based on an anecdote in which the composer Robert Schumann referred to the intensity of Chopin’s compositions as “cannons hidden in roses.” For Banisadr, the idea of an innate power that lies beneath the beauty of a work aligns with his categorization of his own paintings as Trojan horses. The paintings beguile with their abstract dynamism, while stealthily raising complex issues and challenging cultural norms.

Banisadr’s persistent engagement with the past helps him identify cycles that recur across time and space. He is interested in historical omissions, and his research extends to regimes that feel compelled to hide or destroy art to diffuse its power. Works like The Changing Past, 2021, address the act of dismantling monuments as a means to upend established hierarchies. This has brought the artist to sculpture. Two new sculptures render his totemic archetypes in three dimensions. Like figures in his paintings, the sculptures emerge from abstraction to form a hybrid cast of characters. Their human scale lends an intimacy to the viewing experience, while their weathered, quasi-figurative nature recalls the sculptures of Cy Twombly and Alberto Giacometti. Twombly’s bronze sculptures, such as Victory, conceived in 1987 and cast in 2005, resemble ancient archeological treasures recovered from the past. Victory alludes to the end of the Trojan War as told in Homer’s Iliad, illustrating the rich mythological iconography found across his sculptures. Banisadr’s sculpture maquettes, for their part, project a monumentality disproportionate to their size. Their intimate scale, coupled with their modulated surfaces, underscores their fundamentally haptic nature. Some evoke objects of private devotion or fetish. Sumerian votive sculptures are a reference. Banisadr has said that to his mind there is a clear distinction between statues and sculptures. In his definition, statues are objects, whereas sculptures, and his in particular, contain a potency and power as talismanic protectors and guardians.(8) 

Banisadr’s psychologically charged practice strives to engage and decipher the complex ecosystem of our contemporary world through the metaphysical power of images. His constructed universes, informed by syncretic references that traverse chronological and geographical divides, transcend human consciousness to engender transformation. Their multidimensional layers of meaning are accessed through a plethora of references and symbols that must be slowly unpacked and considered. In particular, the artist’s recent largescale paintings function as ambitious worldscapes where hybrid figures, at once ancient and futuristic, emerge from the ether to engage in the primordial search for enlightenment. Banisadr acts as a shaman who harnesses symbols and stories from across the art historical canon to navigate the boundaries of the human imagination and remind the viewer of the overarching power of the unknown. His works are also meant to reflect the self. Of his paintings, the artist has said, “I mean, as humans, we’re so complex and there’s so much multiplicity within ourselves, right? So to try to understand the self is daily work. . . [The creatures he paints] could be self portrait[s] in a way, because you could say I’m made out of these multiplicities. It’s not them I’m painting, it’s like they’re all there within ourselves.”(9) This journey is aptly reflected in the artist’s favorite poem, “Only Breath,” by the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, which expresses how his sweeping, visionary paintings pursue a spiritual existence that transcends sociopolitical and cultural definition. The poem ends with an acknowledgment of the speaker’s humanity:

My place is the placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.(10)

---

Ali Banisadr’s densely populated paintings are influenced by the artist’s perception of sound as inextricably linked to color and form. Drawing on childhood experiences of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) in his native Tehran, where explosions and other aural disturbances were commonplace, as well as his extant synesthesia, Banisadr painstakingly and intuitively builds complex compositions that exude a vitality at once turbulent and celebratory. Forthcoming and recent solo exhibitions include Buffalo AKG Art Museum  (2026), Katonah Museum of Art (2025), Museo Stefano Bardini and Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (2021), Benaki Museum, Athens (2020), and Wadsworth Atheneum (2020). Banisadr’s work is held by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Wadsworth Atheneum, among other museums.

Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe is Director and Chief Curator of the Katonah Museum of Art. She was formerly Vice president for Global Artistic Programs and Director of the Asia Society Museum, following her tenure as Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. She has served in curatorial capacities at Hunter College, Cai Guo-Qiang’s studio, and the Painting and Sculpture Department at MoMA. Yun Mapplethorpe is a widely published author and frequent lecturer on modern and contemporary art. 

---

Exhibition Catalogue

ORDER HERE

---

This essay first appeared in Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist, ed. Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe (Katonah, NY: Katonah Museum of Art, 2025), 14-28. © Katonah Museum of Art. Reproduced with permission; Artwork by Ali Banisadr © Ali Banisadr; Jackson Pollock, The Moon Woman, 1942. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976. Artwork © Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York; Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797–1858). The City Flourishing, Tanabata Festival, No. 73 from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 7th month of 1857. Woodblock print, Sheet: 14 3/16 x 9 1/4 in. (36 x 23.5 cm) Image: 13 3/8 x 8 3/4 in. (34 x 22.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Anna Ferris, 30.1478.73. Photo: Brooklyn Museum.

---

Notes
1. “Boris Groys in Conversation with Ali Banisadr,” in Ali Banisadr: One Hundred and Twenty-Five Paintings (London: Blain|Southern, 2015), 25.
2. Ali Banisadr in conversation with John Yau, July 17, 2023, in Ali Banisadr: The Changing Past (London: Victoria Miro, 2023), 85.
3. Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 79.
4. Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (London: Aldus Books Limited, 1964), 21.
5. Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Capricorn Books, 1961), 82.
6. Lucy Flint, “Jackson Pollock, The Moon Woman,” Guggenheim Collection Online, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3473, accessed December 21, 2024.
7. http://www.alibanisadr.com/exhibitions/ali-banisadr-the-changing-past, accessed December 21, 2024.
8. Ali Banisadr in conversation with the author, June 5, 2024.
9. Ali Banisadr in conversation with John Yau, 87.
10. The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks with John Moyne, A. J. Arberry, and Reynold Nicholson (New York: Harper, 1995), 32.