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. His work also unsettles conventional notions of originality, suggesting that meaning emerges through repetition, variation, and the reworking of inherited forms.
Painting
Behzadi’s paintings unfold through layered gesture, colour, and texture, where surfaces become sites of vulnerability, persistence, and reflection. Moving between figuration and abstraction, he often returns to self-portraiture as a way of probing identity, presence, and the thresholds between interiority and exposure. His figures appear fragile yet insistent, distorted yet faceless, holding opposites in tension, placing the body between personal and collective experience, intimacy and distance. Across self-portraits, portraits, still lifes, abstraction and figural compositions, painting becomes a method of registering time, memory, and the persistence of human presence.
Photography and the Studio
Photography extends these concerns to the overlooked 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, memory, and care. In both series, photography reflects back on painting, revealing how making is always bound to its traces and to the material conditions of artistic labour.
Dialogue Between Mediums
Painting and photography form a dialogue. Painting accumulates through duration, while photography collapses time into an instant and disperses it in circulation. Behzadi navigates this movement between slowness and immediacy, solitude and encounter, intimacy and dissemination, holding both poles in creative tension, to explore what it means to create and represent today. This movement between mediums also foregrounds a broader question: what values might guide artistic practice when set against the pressures of commodification and spectacle?
On Authenticity
Behzadi’s practice increasingly turns toward the question of authenticity, approached less as an essence to be uncovered than as an orientation within creative work. This orientation privileges sincerity over irony, attentiveness over detachment, and vulnerability over performance. Sincerity here is not naïve but informed, a stance that embraces openness and care as a deliberate form of resistance. To pursue authenticity in this sense is not to affirm a fixed truth, but to cultivate a mode of practice that resists cynicism and commodification. In this way, authenticity becomes a form of subversion, a way of creating that insists on the value of presence, persistence, and a direct engagement with what compels him to make.
Practice and Search
Trained first in medicine before studying art at City Lit and the Slade School of Fine Art, Behzadi brings discipline and reflection to his practice. His work translates displacement, memory, and identity into layered visual forms that are at once personal and contemporary. Through painting and photography, he develops strategies of subversion that resist the demand for originality, framing art as a space where labour, memory, and the self are traced, questioned, and reimagined.