Amir Salamat • Bio

Amir Salamat was born in Tehran to a large, loving, and artistic family. The youngest of five children. Art and appreciation for art in the form of books, paintings and ceramics were all over the Salamat household, which fueled his interests. Interested in drawing and painting from a young age, he started painting in oil around the age of 15.

His early paintings were in the surrealistic style, highly influenced by Salvador Dali. During the next few years, he privately studied the works of painters such as Miro, Klee, Picasso, and the impressionists. While maintaining a certain surrealistic approach, his work became more linear with brighter colors. His paintings started to show the influence of such painters as Hundretwasser and Klee. Later on, using other mediums along with oils, such as pastels, watercolor and acrylic Amir’s work showed greater influence by Jackson Pollack, Basquiat and Haring as evident in his most recent work, typically on board using latex and oil paint.

Immediately prior to the 1979, Amir left Iran to finish his studies in Engineering, He finished school with a Masters in Structural Engineering, before settling in the Bay Area, where he still lives with his two children.

Several factors may have ignited the imagery prevalent in this artist's work. While maintaining a certain surrealistic flavor, Amir’s work takes on a distinctive middle-eastern flavor that repeatedly used symbolism and religious imagery such as Mullahs, faceless veiled women, crosses and other Judeo-Christian metaphors to tell his story. Mosques, minarets, shadowy figures, skulls and arrows are other frequent visitors in the artist's composition. Bold colors carry over to his present work at times interspersed with Latin and Persian scripts. They are sometimes random thoughts and sometimes indecipherable. However, the tongue-in-cheek religious zealotry now and again belies a sense of humor, so piercing, almost discordant in it's presence that it forces a second and third look.

Perhaps the one example betraying the mind of an engineer fused with that of an artist, is the recurring theme of chaos, based on the science. The "Theory of Chaos" champions the belief that one small and seemingly insignificant thing can have a colossal effect on the. Visible at first glance in the artist's newer work, the unruliness of chaos is represented by syncopated lines, shapes and color. However, there are always small enclaves of order within the composition in terms of balance, at first lost in the confusion, then suddenly visible and strangely reassuring. As the science confirms, chaos can lurk behind a façade of order and yet deep inside the chaos lurks a type of order. Both the science and the art it inspires, offer a new way of seeing patterns where formerly only the random was observed.