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 is concerned with making images to reflect on meaning. His wide approach to painting underscores the potentiality of painting to address various concerns within a practice. Examination of his oeuvre alludes to interrelation between thinking and doing, surface and depth, the light and the dark, the particular and the universal, the mundane and the profound.
Behzadi's formal approach to painting and his use of paint 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. 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.