Nostatollah Moslemian is an Iranian prominent contemporary painter. He was born in 1951 in Salmas, a north-western city of Iran. He was graduated from the University of Tehran, Faculty of Fine Arts, in painting. Through his long and prolific career of painting, he has always been deeply engaged with the issues of identity and cultural activism.
Moslemian belongs to a generation of Iranian artists who started their career during the outbreak of the Islamic Revolution and have been a witness to the incident of the Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. His life-long emphasis on reflecting the lived experience and socio-political issues has always been combined with an ongoing quest for the Modernist form, what he believes is able to embrace the contemporary, paradoxical experience, while contemplating on the idea of the historical pictorial legacy.
Moslemian’s painting continuum is characterized by the expansion and suspension of visual elements, the disintegration of the space, and a paradoxical picture plane. His characteristic spatio-temporal arrangement of the pictorial field involves the simultaneous existence of several visual languages in a single image. The paintings are, then, comprised of many fragments juxtaposed in a collage-like organization.
In his drawings, the artist’s familiar method of complex, fragmented picture space, a combination of figuration and abstraction, multiple painting areas and spatio-temporal suspension can be seen alongside a much-advanced undertaking of autonomous, expressive drawings.
Nosratollah Moslemian has been awarded first prize in the First Biennial of The Islamic World (Tehran, 2000) and the first prize in the First Beijing painting Biennial (2003). His paintings have been exhibited worldwide, including in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, London, Geneva, New York, Uzbekistan, Netherlands, etc.