"Widely-regarded by curators and collectors as one of the most accomplished and exciting young Iranian artists at work today, New York resident Ali Banisadr's upward career trajectory has accelerated in the past few years with the commensurate growth in the depth and scale of his busy, complex colourful canvases.

 A graduate of New York's School of Visual Art and subsequently, the city's Academy of Art, from which he earned his BFA in 2007, this young painter has already caused global excitement with his spectacular, epic canvases that are imbued not only with breathtaking compositional technique and structure, but effervesce with dynamic juxtapositions, swirling, interlocking forms and motifs and richly-evocative narratives. Having garnered awards – from the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting (2010), Post-Graduate Research Fellowship, New York Academy of Art, New York (2007–08) Travel Grant to Normandy, France at the Chateaux Balleroy (2006) and the Prince of Wales / Forbes Foundation (2006), Banisadr is already in such eminent collections as the The British Museum, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Francois Pinault Foundation and the Saatchi Gallery.

Dating from 2010, '2M' is from the 'Drawings' series of appealingly raw monoprints, which provide a fascinating insight into specific explorations of form repetition, structure and colour. Bold and dynamic, Banisadr's use of colour references traditional Persian associations with red, white and black in varying degrees. These colours are fundamental to Iranian art and mythology, each carrying broad associatives qualities. White symbolises purity, piety and moral standing. Black denotes damnation, spiritual bankruptcy or on a more metaphysical level, a void, moribund of enlightenment and succor. Red, meanwhile radiates passion, blood, love and valour.

'With the monoprints, I had this idea of making work that mimics a film negative,' explained Banisadr. 'I wanted it to have a forensic quality to it as if you were looking at these for some kind of. It also made me think of Warhol and Muybridge... In each roll, the image would repeat itself like a film roll but each image would be slightly different, and then I would work each image individually [by hand] to alter them a bit. I was able to create a different kind of space; on each piece of paper there would be about 4-5 different rolls of prints and each had a different set of images. I wanted it to have a feeling as if you were an investigator looking for some kind of clue...'

'2M''s parent series 'Drawings' serves as a crucial counterpoint to Banisadr's more recent works in which vast canvases froth, swirl and boil with richly-textured visual maelstroms of imagery, reminiscent of scenes from Bruguel and Hieronymous Bosch. These canvases have rightly earned Banisadr a reputation as a febrile, rapidly-evolving talent to watch in the years ahead."

- Arsalan Mohammad