Biography

Ali Akbar Safaian was born in 1947 in Sang-e Sar, a town in northwestern Iran on the slope of the Alborz mountains. 
As a teenager, inspired by pictures in his school and environment, he starts to stay awake at nights 
and to draw the shapes of his sleeping brothers and sisters. Accordingly, he decides to study Arts and
 enrolls at the University of Fine Arts, where he studies till 1970. His first soloexhibitions are shown 
in the Galeries Seyhoun and Solivan. To develop his style and expression, he travels to Afghanistan,
 India, Nepal, Italy and finally Paris, where he lives from 1979-1981 as an independent artist. He owes 
these trips an intensive insight to the Easts impersonal, vedantic culture and the Wests life-accented
 subjectivity. After the consolidation of the Islamic Republic he flees to Pegnitz (Germany), a town close
 to Bayreuth, where he would, in a calm and concentrated atmosphere, experience his most productive
 period of work. Today he lives and works in Berlin. 

periods / painting

The works produced in this early period, including the years after diploma, deal with the human and 
animal figure on the edge of dissolution. Concerning the artistitc method of this period Javad Mojabi
 wrote in „Ettealat“: „When designing his paintings Safaian starts from the angle of an
 Iranian miniature painter: he starts drawing the picture starting from a perspective without conceiving
 a plan or intention. He is driven by the inspiration of colors and lines.“ A potentially infinte process – 
thus he wrote further: „The painting is finished without the cubic spaces being completed.“ 
During the middle period, the spaces of his works are populated with human, natural and mechanical 
elements. One of the most important works of this period is War and Peace, in which the 
phantastic decomposition of space does not stand anymore for itself, but for the condition of the world. 
With the following mixed-media series he breaks with figuration and devotes himself to structures.  
Layers overlap layers like knotted roots: the paintings don´t communicate anymore something directly, but 
simply are.  

Inheritance, Earth Inheritance / relief 

Since 2004 Ali Akbar Safaian has focused on large-scale relief works. Herefrom two series emerged: 
Earth Inheritance and Inheritance. The former deals with organic structures, which are once consciously
 shaped, once seem to be unmade, shapeless, formless, speechless like primary matter. Grey, brown, 
green colours reflect soil, minerals, subteresstrial life. The relief-surface is shaped in such a manner that 
it gives the recipient the impression of layers of materials below the ground or of mystically meditative soil.
 The concretism of this series is also clearly expressed in the next: Inheritance. Here the reliefs are 
monochromous. Submerged into one colour each shape is equal to another, nothing is accentuated,
 everything is one. Thus the artist drew back himself, trying not to mark the work with indices of personal
 handwriting in composition and shape, but to create a piece of matter, something that remains, when one
 takes the growing, moved and driving life away from the world. Asked what drives him towards art, the artis
t answered:

„To me art is an attempt to lay existence open.“