Bahram Alivandi

He is influenced by Persian culture, depicting characters and stories from legends and epic poetry by important figures like Ferdowsi and Farid ad-Din Attar.

Outstanding works include a series of large-scale oil paintings executed in the 1980s which depict such important figures as Mithra, Jesus Christ, the Simorgh, and Ferdowsi himself.

Alivandi's early paintings, including those from the 1980s, use the now-traditional medium of oil on canvas, yet his aesthetic style, which recalls the stained glass of medieval churches, is highly personal.

During the 1990s Alivandi continued to work in oils, but abandoned the traditional canvas, choosing instead to apply his paints directly to newspaper; a method pioneered by the cubists in the early 1900s.

Since circa 2000, he increasingly works with the angelique pointillage technique (as seen in the adjacent image), a unique method of painting with extremely small dots of ink which are then covered with a layer of veneer to lock and intensify the colours.