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Lot Essay
“My art is based on three things: the history of myself, the history of our century, and the history of art.” - Ali Banisadr (J. Beer, “Conversation with the Unnamed: Ali Banisadr”, in Art-Rated, January 2012).
On a great scale, Homo Deus is an expansive canvas in which Ali Banisadr explores humanity’s ambition to transcend its biological limits and attain supernatural power over life, death and creation. The size of the painting is integral to its impact: its vast surface envelops the viewer in a dense, unstable world of fragmented figures, sweeping gestures and shifting forms. The title, Latin for human god, was popularised by historian Yuval Noah Harari as the title of his 2015 book on the next stage of human evolution. In the book, Harari predicts that Homo sapiens will attempt to use science, technology and artificial intelligence to upgrade themselves into god-like beings. As our reliance on technology intensifies, this desire for transcendence becomes increasingly entangled with the digital systems and algorithms that shape contemporary life. Harari envisions an entirely new species in the future and imagines the universe as consisting of streams of data interconnected through algorithms. The more human beings surrender themselves to technology, the more they risk losing their humanity. Banisadr translates these anxieties into a visual language in which the boundaries between human and non-human, organic and technological, begin to dissolve.
The work forms part of a period in Banisadr’s oeuvre characterised by a more intimate and direct perspective, accompanied by greater freedom and openness in his brushwork. This marked a shift from the broad, bird’s-eye viewpoints of his earlier paintings towards a more immediate engagement with the figures and spaces within the composition. Yet a defining element of his practice remains his construction of imagined worlds that do not exist in order to examine the reality that does. Drawing on personal memories of the Iran-Iraq War, literature, philosophy and music, as well as a wide range of art-historical sources—from Persian miniatures and the late Medieval Flemish masters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, to Venetian Renaissance painters such as Jacopo Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, and contemporary artists including David Hockney and Neo Rauch—Banisadr creates pictorial spaces in which the past, present and future can coexist. His paintings become realms where the boundaries between fantasy and reality, the familiar and unfamiliar, begin to dissolve. Within this unstable terrain, Banisadr distils the contradictions, anxieties and uncertainties of human experience, creating images that resist fixed interpretation.
In Homo Deus, this instability is embodied through the metamorphosis of its figures, which appear caught between states of being. They are neither entirely human nor entirely other but suspended within a moment of flux. In the lower half of the canvas, fragmented figures emerge from a dense and restless pictorial field, their forms appearing to shift between human and non-human states. To the right, an elephant-like figure seems to emerge from the fray, while on the left sits an entity that seems half bird, half human. In the centre of the lower half of the composition, an area of blue and red dots catches the eye, alluding to the ‘pixelation’ of our world and emphasising the increasingly blurred line between humanity and technology. The predominance of black further darkens the atmosphere, lending the painting a sense of unease that resonates with the dystopian implications of Harari’s vision. The work’s visual turbulence recalls Banisadr’s own description of his paintings as a ‘civil war’ within his thoughts, in which figures emerge as shifting archetypes that resist fixed categorisation.
Above the fragmented figures, large, bird-like wings dominate the upper composition. Birds recur throughout Banisadr’s visual language as symbols of freedom and transcendence, while their implied cries and the rhythmic movement of beating wings introduce an auditory dimension to the composition. Flight may suggest liberation and escape, yet the dark passages surrounding the wings imply that this freedom remains tethered. Banisadr’s synaesthesia, a condition in which sound and colour are experienced as interconnected, is central to this relationship between the visual and the auditory. The restless surfaces of his paintings bring together contrasting modes of mark-making, placing areas of precise, controlled brushwork alongside energetic and gestural passages. These opposing sensibilities create a visual rhythm that seems to move between order and disorder, restraint and release. As Banisadr has explained, rhythm is fundamental to his sense of scale: the composition must guide the eye slowly through the painting, allowing details and figures to emerge through repeated viewing.
In Homo Deus, this orchestration of rhythm, movement and scale creates an environment that is at once immersive and unstable. The painting does not offer a single narrative or fixed interpretation; instead, its monumental surface becomes a space in which fragments of humanity, technology, memory and myth collide. Banisadr’s imagined world ultimately reflects the uncertainty of the one we inhabit, peeling back the boundary between chaos and composure, and between human aspiration and the forces that increasingly shape it.
Homo Deus was featured in Foreign Lands, Banisadr’s first solo museum exhibition in Europe, organised by Het Noordbrabants Museum, Den Bosch, in 2019. The exhibition subsequently travelled to Vienna, where the work was presented at the Gemäldegalerie as part of Bosch & Banisadr: Ali Banisadr: We Work in Shadows (2019). The work had previously been exhibited in Berlin in Ali Banisadr: The World Upside Down at Blain Southern (2018). Its inclusion in these significant exhibitions underscores the importance of Homo Deus within Banisadr’s oeuvre.
Born in Tehran in 1976, Ali Banisadr moved with his family to the United States in 1988 and later settled in New York. He studied philosophy before receiving his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and MFA from the New York Academy of Art, New York. His paintings draw on personal and collective memory, art history and the visual cultures of Iran and the West, bringing together figuration and abstraction in densely layered imagined worlds.
His work is held in major international institutional collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna; and Het Noordbrabants Museum, Den Bosch; and Qatar Museums, Doha.
On a great scale, Homo Deus is an expansive canvas in which Ali Banisadr explores humanity’s ambition to transcend its biological limits and attain supernatural power over life, death and creation. The size of the painting is integral to its impact: its vast surface envelops the viewer in a dense, unstable world of fragmented figures, sweeping gestures and shifting forms. The title, Latin for human god, was popularised by historian Yuval Noah Harari as the title of his 2015 book on the next stage of human evolution. In the book, Harari predicts that Homo sapiens will attempt to use science, technology and artificial intelligence to upgrade themselves into god-like beings. As our reliance on technology intensifies, this desire for transcendence becomes increasingly entangled with the digital systems and algorithms that shape contemporary life. Harari envisions an entirely new species in the future and imagines the universe as consisting of streams of data interconnected through algorithms. The more human beings surrender themselves to technology, the more they risk losing their humanity. Banisadr translates these anxieties into a visual language in which the boundaries between human and non-human, organic and technological, begin to dissolve.
The work forms part of a period in Banisadr’s oeuvre characterised by a more intimate and direct perspective, accompanied by greater freedom and openness in his brushwork. This marked a shift from the broad, bird’s-eye viewpoints of his earlier paintings towards a more immediate engagement with the figures and spaces within the composition. Yet a defining element of his practice remains his construction of imagined worlds that do not exist in order to examine the reality that does. Drawing on personal memories of the Iran-Iraq War, literature, philosophy and music, as well as a wide range of art-historical sources—from Persian miniatures and the late Medieval Flemish masters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, to Venetian Renaissance painters such as Jacopo Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, and contemporary artists including David Hockney and Neo Rauch—Banisadr creates pictorial spaces in which the past, present and future can coexist. His paintings become realms where the boundaries between fantasy and reality, the familiar and unfamiliar, begin to dissolve. Within this unstable terrain, Banisadr distils the contradictions, anxieties and uncertainties of human experience, creating images that resist fixed interpretation.
In Homo Deus, this instability is embodied through the metamorphosis of its figures, which appear caught between states of being. They are neither entirely human nor entirely other but suspended within a moment of flux. In the lower half of the canvas, fragmented figures emerge from a dense and restless pictorial field, their forms appearing to shift between human and non-human states. To the right, an elephant-like figure seems to emerge from the fray, while on the left sits an entity that seems half bird, half human. In the centre of the lower half of the composition, an area of blue and red dots catches the eye, alluding to the ‘pixelation’ of our world and emphasising the increasingly blurred line between humanity and technology. The predominance of black further darkens the atmosphere, lending the painting a sense of unease that resonates with the dystopian implications of Harari’s vision. The work’s visual turbulence recalls Banisadr’s own description of his paintings as a ‘civil war’ within his thoughts, in which figures emerge as shifting archetypes that resist fixed categorisation.
Above the fragmented figures, large, bird-like wings dominate the upper composition. Birds recur throughout Banisadr’s visual language as symbols of freedom and transcendence, while their implied cries and the rhythmic movement of beating wings introduce an auditory dimension to the composition. Flight may suggest liberation and escape, yet the dark passages surrounding the wings imply that this freedom remains tethered. Banisadr’s synaesthesia, a condition in which sound and colour are experienced as interconnected, is central to this relationship between the visual and the auditory. The restless surfaces of his paintings bring together contrasting modes of mark-making, placing areas of precise, controlled brushwork alongside energetic and gestural passages. These opposing sensibilities create a visual rhythm that seems to move between order and disorder, restraint and release. As Banisadr has explained, rhythm is fundamental to his sense of scale: the composition must guide the eye slowly through the painting, allowing details and figures to emerge through repeated viewing.
In Homo Deus, this orchestration of rhythm, movement and scale creates an environment that is at once immersive and unstable. The painting does not offer a single narrative or fixed interpretation; instead, its monumental surface becomes a space in which fragments of humanity, technology, memory and myth collide. Banisadr’s imagined world ultimately reflects the uncertainty of the one we inhabit, peeling back the boundary between chaos and composure, and between human aspiration and the forces that increasingly shape it.
Homo Deus was featured in Foreign Lands, Banisadr’s first solo museum exhibition in Europe, organised by Het Noordbrabants Museum, Den Bosch, in 2019. The exhibition subsequently travelled to Vienna, where the work was presented at the Gemäldegalerie as part of Bosch & Banisadr: Ali Banisadr: We Work in Shadows (2019). The work had previously been exhibited in Berlin in Ali Banisadr: The World Upside Down at Blain Southern (2018). Its inclusion in these significant exhibitions underscores the importance of Homo Deus within Banisadr’s oeuvre.
Born in Tehran in 1976, Ali Banisadr moved with his family to the United States in 1988 and later settled in New York. He studied philosophy before receiving his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and MFA from the New York Academy of Art, New York. His paintings draw on personal and collective memory, art history and the visual cultures of Iran and the West, bringing together figuration and abstraction in densely layered imagined worlds.
His work is held in major international institutional collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna; and Het Noordbrabants Museum, Den Bosch; and Qatar Museums, Doha.