About
Origins
Oliver Behzadi was born in Tehran, where his formative years unfolded amid upheaval and displacement, before relocating to London as a teenager. Now based in East London, his practice is grounded in questions of memory, belonging, and the contested politics of representation, exploring how identity and presence are made visible, obscured, or unsettled through artistic form.
Painting
Behzadi’s paintings operate through layered gesture, colour, and texture, where surfaces function as sites of vulnerability, persistence, and reflection. Moving between figuration and abstraction, he often returns to self-portraiture to interrogate identity, presence, and the thresholds between interiority and exposure. His figures appear fragile yet insistent, sometimes dysmorphic or partially obscured, situating the body in tension between personal and collective experience, intimacy and distance. Across self-portraits, portraits, still lifes, and figural compositions, painting becomes a deliberate method of registering temporality, traces of memory, and the persistence of human presence.
Photography and the Studio
Photography extends these concerns to the often-overlooked residues of practice. The Shed Project documents the studio as a living archive, where dust, stains, and pigment traces operate 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 on painting itself, revealing how creation is inseparable from its traces and the material, temporal conditions of artistic labour.
Dialogue Between Mediums
Painting and photography form a dialogical field. Painting accumulates through duration, while photography collapses time into an instant and disperses it through circulation. Behzadi navigates this oscillation between slowness and immediacy, solitude and encounter, intimacy and dissemination to examine what it means to create and represent today.
Practice and Search
Trained initially in medicine before studying art at City Lit and the Slade School of Fine Art, Behzadi approaches making with discipline and reflection. His work translates displacement, memory, and identity into layered visual forms that are both personal and insistently contemporary. Through these processes, his practice underscores the capacity of art to remain vital, a space where labour, memory, and the self are traced, interrogated, and reimagined.