Ali Rastegar is a fine art graduate of Kerman’s Bahonar University. He studied painting at the university of Kerman and graduated in 2007. He exhibited his paintings in a couple of group exhibitions while attending university and through the 2000s he had his first independent experiences as a visual artist in new and contemporary media and art. Rastegar joined the new media wave of Iranian art after participating in a performance by Ali Kalantari titled “Hungry Human” as an undergraduate student in 2004 and also taking part in a new media exhibition in Tehran and had two performances in Kerman University titled “Me & Myself” and “Miracle in Catacombs”. Rastegar landed his first solo exhibition at Seyhoun gallery titled “25 Minutes After Last Supper” and then his exhibitions “Tadj es-Saltaneh Reports from Venus” at Homa Gallery, “You and Me, We, He, and Again We” at Mah Gallery, and “House Is not Home” at Artibition Gallery, respectively. He has also exhibited his works at other group exhibitions at Artibition Gallery, Art Impact International United States,  Artigiano Art fair of Italy, Mah Gallery, and Iranian Artist Forum.
About the artist

Ali Rastegar’s artworks have an expressive and conceptual characteristic and are in a constant historical conversation regarding their form and subject; a conversation with art history as a global artist and simultaneous conversation with the ecosystem, identity, and his roots as an Iranian artist. Although he finds new approaches to work with new media, yet he has been faithful to his own conceptual visual language up until now. What is traceable in his three solo exhibitions and also in Rastgar’s performances is his constant search and effort to translate his ideas into a visual language. This translation manifested with obviously symbolist and narrative literature at his first exhibition, but as his visual expression style matured, it became more complicated and less talkative. Rastegar's primary collections showed his efforts to find his own visual expression style as an artist. Curiosity and search to find a language suitable for visual literature enabling him to express his expressive and criticizing aspect through form and images. Rastegar's paintings present a metaphoric concept regarding objects; and as a result, objective elements gain the linguistic aspect of subjective forms. He creates a seemingly sweat dream by combining architecture and surrealistic scenes of a familiar yet stranger world, daily reality, and beyond, by ridiculing gravity through representing floating humans in his images, a sweat dream waiting to be destroyed, damaged, and, demolished at any given moment.