dideh: biography

Bahram Dabiri was born in Shiraz in 1950. His family appreciated art; his mother was the daughter of a landowner who loved art and literature, and his father, who took no pride in aristocracy, had a deep interest in literature and history. Dabiri’s childhood was simultaneous with the disintegration of Iran's social system and the emergence of a new elite. Even the remnants of an aristocracy on the verge of extinction could not help keep his family in his hometown, leaving them with no alternative but to migrate to Tehran.

The twelve-year-old Dabiri adopted a strong interest in painting when he saw the movie The World of Suzie Wang, a dramatic story of an artist’s life. Later on he concluded that painting is well beyond an occupation; it is a way of life. Upon entering the College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, in 1969, he studied the processes of modernism and the works of great artists while learning about his cultural identity and the national and historical background of his country. The works of Dabiri are classified into three distinct eras: first, his studying years; second, his big murals and paintings during the Revolution; and third, his works after 1981, which reflect various different dimensions of modernistic painting.

Dabiri is engaged with both modernism and tradition. His works are narratives that, at times, mix his fundamental beliefs with the language of life and contemporary painting to express the concepts within his mind. He has his own narrative and symbolic style, method and criteria and depicts the world sometimes delicately and poetically and at other times violently and horrifically. Nevertheless, he does not paint with the obsolete beliefs of his predecessors. In both cases, he creates a beautiful scene. Dabiri uses certain techniques that he has acquired through his experiences. For instance, he sometimes paints one scene within another, thus demonstrating an event that is taking place inside another.

What is significant in Dabiri’s paintings is his consistency of thought. Each of his works inevitably belongs to his mental world, and he paints with the same language and images that have been constructing his dreams for a very long time. He does not wish to create a world and space in a traditional, systematic easily decodable way. Rather, he tends to develop an atmosphere of infinity in which explicitness is inefficient; consequently, his works enjoy a deeper visual effect. His paintings are often based on epics or tragedies. The tragic essence may not be implied on the canvas directly, but may unveil itself within the dramatic circumstances of the figures in the painting. The forms and conditions encompassing their surroundings exhibit the force of destiny and tell of the pains and sufferings of humankind.

One of the important features of his works, which are combinations of drawing and painting, is that they both reassure the spectator of their being representations of real objects while mystifying him or her as to their actual meaning. There is no doubt over what has been painted; the hesitation arises about the time and place and purpose of the painting, and why the endlessness of space intentionally is broken where it is. At times it seems that certain images have been maintained in a vast but scattered space in which the pulse of life continues beating, and the sound of its breath is clearly audible.

Ali Asghar Gharebaghi

One-man exhibitions:

Group exhibitions: