Amir H. Fallah (Iranian American, b. 1979) is a painter whose maximalist canvases cloak their subjects in dense patterns and cultural imagery, obscuring their faces to question how identity is read from appearance.Fallah was born in Tehran in 1979, during the Islamic Revolution, and moved to the United States as a child.,He is based in Los Angeles.
Each work begins with a personal narrative that Fallah widens into a broader social or political theme. He draws on an extensive image archive built over five years, pulling 25 to 30 images at a time for each composition. Fallah compares the process to assembling a puzzle, reworking scale and color over weeks or months before the sketch is finalized and drawn onto canvas.Fallah began his career as a graffiti artist before founding and publishing the art and design magazine Beautiful/Decay from 1996 to 2013.
In 2023 the Fowler Museum at UCLA presented “The Fallacy of Borders”, Fallah's first Los Angeles museum exhibition. More than 25 paintings, sculptures and stained-glass works were organized around his Iranian American heritage and immigrant experience. Curator Amy Landau said the exhibition's themes were “anchored in his migrant experience”.Fallah's work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Jorge M. Pérez Collection and the Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, among other institutions.
In November 2022 Fallah exhibited the digital work Wheel of Life in “Peer to Peer”, an online group exhibition curated by Tina Rivers Ryan for the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.,The piece combines his own studio photography with imagery sampled from Frank Stella's painting Lac Laronge III and motifs including an archaic cosmological chart and a cow's skull.The Brooklyn Rail described Fallah as “a painter who has advocated for a more rigorous discourse around the digital art associated with NFTs”.
