About

Origin

Born in Tehran, Oliver Behzadi spent his early years amid upheaval and displacement before relocating to London as a teenager. Now based in East London, his practice is shaped by questions of memory, belonging, and the entanglement of representation with power. He explores how identity forms in relation to Otherness, and how presence may be rendered visible, obscured, or subverted through artistic form.

Painting as Duration

Behzadi's practice centres on returning—to canvases, to images, to questions that remain unresolved. Rather than starting fresh, he revisits and reworks paintings over extended periods, sometimes months or years. Surfaces accumulate and are partially effaced; earlier gestures persist beneath subsequent layers. This approach treats painting less as the production of discrete objects than as a form of duration, where meaning emerges through repetition, revision, and the slow sedimentation of time.

Self-Portraits

The self-portrait series engages directly with the face as a site of recognition and refusal. These paintings probe the thresholds between interiority and exposure, exploring what it means to render oneself visible while resisting the demand for legibility. Shaped by experiences of displacement, the works approach self-representation not as affirmation but as negotiation—with systems that seek to fix identity, and with the camera and mirror that have historically mediated how subjects are seen and known.

Figure Paintings

A separate body of work depicts faceless, standing figures placed into inherited canvases. These figures occupy ambiguous ground: neither portraits nor archetypes, they suggest presence without particularity. Works such as Storm, Is Coming, and Still Standing hold contemporary conditions of precarity and persistence in tension. The figures confront the viewer directly, neither yielding nor advancing—bodies that register exposure to forces beyond their control while maintaining a quiet, fragile agency.

Abstract Paintings

The abstract works share the same temporal method. Returned to and reworked, their surfaces become palimpsests where colour, texture, and gesture accumulate in ways that resist resolution. These paintings are not conceived as expressions of spontaneity but as sustained encounters with material and memory, developing through a process closer to erosion or accretion than singular composition.

Photography

Photography extends these concerns to the residues of practice. The Shed Project documents the studio as a living archive, where dust, stains, and pigment traces act as markers of labour and duration. The Cloth Project transforms studio rags—hardened through repetition—into fragile repositories of gesture and care. In both series, photography reflects back on painting, attending to what remains after the work is made: the material conditions and overlooked traces of artistic labour.

Across Mediums

Painting accumulates through slowness and solitude; photography collapses time into an instant and disperses it in circulation. Behzadi moves between these poles, exploring what it means to create when set against the pressures of speed, spectacle, and commodification. Across mediums, the work offers itself as a space where labour, memory, and presence are traced, questioned, and held open.

Background

Trained first in medicine before studying art at City Lit and the Slade School of Fine Art, Behzadi brings discipline and sustained attention to a practice that translates displacement, memory, and identity into layered visual forms.