Born to a religious family in Tehran, Iran during a time of war and upheaval, Taha Heydari (b. 1986) makes paintings that engage with the ways in which ideology manifests in lived experience. A member of the generation which 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. An extensive digital archive drawing from Iranian history and modern pop culture serves as a point of departure for Heydari’s imaginative environments in which contradictory forces collide.

Heydari received his BFA from the Art University of Tehran in 2009 and moved to the United States in 2014 to attend the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he received his MFA in 2016. Heydari’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Winston-Salem, and Tehran, and collected by the Baltimore Museum of Art in addition to private collections worldwide.