Born to a religious family in Tehran, Iran during a time of war and upheaval, Taha Heydari makes paintings that engage with the ways in which ideology manifests in lived experience. A member of the generation that emerged following the 1978 Islamic Revolution, Heydari deploys various modes of mark-making as a way to reveal and deconstruct the binaries which shaped his identity: East and West, body and soul, past and future. Troubling the stability of the systems which produce and uphold these oppositions, his large-scale paintings are composed of a chaotic dance between machine-like grids and bodily gestures. Drawing from Iranian history and modern pop culture, his extensive digital archive serves as a point of departure for Heydari’s imaginative environments in which contradictory forces collide.
After spending the first twenty-eight years of his life in Iran and then moving to the United States, Heydari has closely observed the correlation of everyday mundanities and more palpably oppressive forces in the omnipresence of ideological order on both sides of the globe. As a way to perform a kind of autopsy on his own place within those systems, and on the larger social fabric itself, Heydari engages with the representation of rupture and conflict.
Heydari’s work will be presented at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022, and he will have a solo exhibition at GAVLAK Palm Beach in January 2023.
