About
Oliver Behzadi was born in Tehran, Iran. He has been living in London since 1986 and lives and works in East London. He has worked across various genres of painting including abstraction and figuration.
Behzadi makes use of formal qualities of paint to create images that are enticing and open to interpretation.
Behzadi's embrace of the idea of self-portraiture over the years has been a constant for him; a place of return and departure where he reflects on the notion of an inner landscape. His self-portraits have become a locus where otherness takes on the formality of a head and torso. These become a template for considering colours and gestures, layers and textures, lines and marks. The self-portrait allude to Behzadi's formal concerns in painting together with his deep sense of what it means to be the other. Behzadi's self-portraits essentially reflect on passage of time through the manipulation of paint on surface; an activity that is temporal and reflective.
Behzadi's wide approach to painting underscores the potentiality of painting to address various concerns within a practice. Examination of his oeuvre suggests interrelation between surface and depth, the light and the dark, the particular and the universal, the mundane and the profound.
Behzadi's formal approach to painting poses questions about the practice of painting and the language of painting and their relevance to contemporary art practice within the context of an authentic engagement with a creative process. His ongoing commitment to painting reveals a certain tension between what to paint and how to paint. His practice reflects on the condition of a painter working in solitude where a particular vision is intertwined with creativity.
Ultimately, Behzadi's work reflects on the notion of agency of an artist as a painter and comments on an ongoing commitment to a practice that is both limiting and open.
Behzadi studied medicine in London and then undertook his artistic studies at City Lit and Slade School of Fine Art.