Reza Farkhondeh

Reza Farkhondeh was born in Iran in 1963. He earned a BA from the University of Tehran, a BFA in Painting from the Beaux-Arts de Dijon, and an MFA from the Villa Arson in Nice. His diverse artistic practice spans videos, short films, drawings, and paintings. Currently, the artist lives in New York.

Reza Farkhondeh's Art Style

Reza Farkhondeh's diverse artistic practice spans videos, short films, drawings, and paintings.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Farkhondeh focused on film and video art before transitioning to oil painting. His early paintings depicted ordinary objects of the era of globalization, primarily plastic toys from '99 cent culture,' rendered with the opulence of salon portraiture.

Before turning to watercolor and acrylic landscape painting in 2002, Farkhondeh also created a series of video performances. His works have since evolved to spark a sense of unrest and disconnection, capturing the signs of daily life in new visual registers that transcend territories and history.

Farkhondeh's paintings, scaled to human height, depict iconic images from Western popular culture. However, since these objects were originally created and produced in Western countries, Farkhondeh challenges the concept of originality in a globalized world. Since 2001, he has explored themes of broken and repaired landscapes—both interior and exterior—using materials like fabric, masking tape, glue, gel, acrylic, and watercolor. Additionally, Farkhondeh engages with texts that analyze the evolution of our social, political, and cultural landscapes.