Amir H. Fallah

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Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present a series of new large-scale paintings by Amir H. Fallah. Titled, Remember My Child…, this is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Over the past decade, Fallah’s work has probed the history of portraiture. Marking a significant shift in the artist’s practice, this new series defies traditional notions of this prominent genre of painting by removing the figure altogether. This absence of the subject’s likeness is now substituted with a wider representation of their personhood—one that spans time and cultures and is articulated through a network of symbols and imagery. Fallah’s paintings question not only the historical role of portraiture, but the cultural systems that are used to identify one person from another.

Decisively autobiographical, these new paintings employ a lexicon of symbols that mark key moments in the artist’s relationship with his young son, which in turn conjure significant moments in the artist’s own life. His childhood memories of Iran, his adolescence in the United States, and his formative years as an adult in Los Angeles all serve as potential coming-of-age lessons that Fallah weaves together with children’s book illustrations that belong to his son, amalgamating personal narratives with historical and contemporary parables. Each painting serves as a diary of lessons, warnings, and ideals that the artist wants to pass on to his son and together become a site map, providing coded insight into the formation of an identity while investigating the cultural values passed between generations.