Temple of the Mind
Buffalo AKG Art Museum
June 26\u2013November 8, 2026
Buffalo, NY<\/p>\n
The study of art history can lead to the perception that the subject of all painting is, in some form or another, an internal discourse on the lineage of painting that precede it. This thinking is more in line with Hegel than how painters think about their work, which calls into question its efficacy. Sometimes however, as in the case of the exhibition\u00a0Ali Banisadr: Temple of the Mind at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the framework is revelatory. This exhibition, co-curated by the artist and the museum\u2019s collectors curator Holly E. Hughes, boldly and astutely situates Banisadr\u2019s art history reference-laden oil paintings and bronze sculptures in the curatorial context of the AKG\u2019s exceptional permanent collection.<\/p>\n
The last half-decade has seen extensive change at the Buffalo AKG, including a renaming from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the addition of a new building to display the contemporary collection and exhibition space. Banisadr\u2019s intervention is staged in the 1905 neoclassical Robert and Elisabeth Wilmers Building, which houses the collection of work from roughly the 1750s to the late 1950s, not traditionally home to contemporary exhibitions. The collection in this building includes canonical works of artists such as Paul Gauguin, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning, as well as significant works by James Ensor, Amedeo Modigliani, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Alexander Rodchenko, and Jackson Pollock, to name a few.<\/p>\n
To juxtapose such paintings with very contemporary work is no small or simple task, but there are few more suited than Ali Banisadr. His dense paintings dance between abstraction and figuration in swirling compositions that create a gripping sensation of perpetual motion in the viewer\u2019s eye, rewarding lengthy viewing. This kinesthetic feat is a signature of the artist\u2019s distinct facture\u2014his studied automatism and sense of spatial fluidity result from a unique deployment of speed and touch. Their subject matter seems to evocatively draw from a deep well of heterogeneous and non-hierarchized art historical imagery, but rarely feel disconnected from our contemporary moment.<\/p>\n
The title of the exhibition is taken from Albert Pinkham Ryder\u2019s modestly scaled 1880s painting Temple of the Mind (itself a reference of Edgar Allen Poe\u2019s 1839 poem \u201cThe Haunted Palace\u201d), hung on the salon wall that opens the first gallery. The works, all made in the last four years, are dispersed throughout the museum, with a single work placed in a number of galleries. No works were made specifically for the exhibition or explicitly in response to the collection, but there is an omnipresent sense of curiosity and playfulness in how Banisadr and Hughes created the fruitful conditions for dialogues of pairings, mirrorings, and reverberations\u2014the juxtapositions contain both harmony and at times a generative dissonance.<\/p>\n
Weighing of the heart (2023) nominally depicts the ancient Egyptian funerary ceremony, the judgement of the dead\u2019s worthiness to enter the afterlife famously represented in the Book of the Dead. Compositionally, it stands out for its use of a structured grid in the upper background, with enclosed cells of abstract form and color that devolve into the painterly eloquence Banisadr is known for. The character at center who is presiding over the ceremony and holds the scales, resembling Pierrot more than Anubis, is flanked by a network of Bosch-like figures and faces who oscillate in and out of legibility. Weighing of the heart is placed near the back of the AKG\u2019s post-Impressionist gallery. Its companion is Ensor\u2019s Le Feu d’artifice (Fireworks) (1887), which depicts a gargantuan fireworks spectacle that dwarfs the figures in foreground, and shares a similar narrative ploy for large passages of dynamic abstract color. Across the gallery is a particularly beautiful \u00c9douard Vuillard, Le Peintre Ker-Xavier Roussel et sa fille (The Painter Ker-Xavier Roussel and His Daughter), (1903), tethered to Banisadr in its discrete spikes of thick impasto. Vuillard flirts with abstraction in service of representation; Banisadr does the opposite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Temple of the MindBuffalo AKG Art MuseumJune 26\u2013November 8, 2026Buffalo, NY The study of art history can lead…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":335708,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-335707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335707\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}