Born in Lahyjan (Iran), Ahmad Nejad is a Persian artist, Parisian by adoption, who now lives and works between Paris and Turin.
He experiments with forms and materials, drawing on the themes, motifs and memories of his country’s culture.
Through his studies and research he has understood and developed the great creative power of memory, a faculty of the mind analogous to the raw material with which human beings draw the contours of the world and themselves. Indeed, excerpts and compositions of poems in his works often appear in his mother tongue, as traces of a sometimes illegible black calligraphy, which play an essential role. Even the various and recurring figures, including knights, women, horses, fish and other animals, allude to legends and accounts of historical places and people, lives and stories long since vanished, which Ahmad reworks in his current conception.
To be carried away by the magic of the symbolism of Ahmad’s works is to enter a dimension in which a rich fabric of forms and warm colors has the power to awaken, in the deepest memory, memories, omens and dreamlike images.
Slow layering and successive “flaying” allow glimpses of the lower layers of the canvas that, like rediscovered frescoes, make elegance the natural result of this partial destruction.
Nejad’s works are regularly exhibited in Europe and Iran in various museums, such as Castello di Rivara, the Grand Palais in Paris, the SCAM (Paris Museum of Photography), the National Museum of 21st Century Arts (Rome), the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Viareggio, the Tornielli Museum (Ameno), and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran.
