Twelve years ago, paintings began to appear on the walls of the city of Tehran. The Iranian artist, who calls himself Mirza Hamid, employed a reddish-brown paint pigment used by Paleolithic artists—the color of clay, close to the hue of dried blood. That ancestral paint has survived, in some cases, 39,000 years. But those ancient artists didn’t have to worry about the authorities erasing their work.
The New Gallery will present “The Origin of All Things,” a show of Hamid’s art, at Basilica Hudson, October 5-30.
“He does not remember how it suddenly happened that he found himself painting on walls, he does not remember the first time,” explains Haleh Atabeigi, codirector of the New Gallery, in an email interview. “But before he knew it, it took him over.” Hamid has no formal art training.
When I first heard “Iranian street art,” I assumed the work was political, but Hamid insists his message is not partisan. He’s trying to return to the beginnings of art, before art critics polluted it with theories and categories.
Hamid depicts universal figures, with no discernible skin color or even gender. There are hands, but no faces. Some of the characters have rounded torsos that resemble dresses, but it’s not entirely clear that they are female. Some combine human and animal bodies. Five people holding candles grow out of the back of a horse. It looks to me like these nameless figures are trying to speak.
The LSD prophet Timothy Leary wrote a book called Confessions of a Hope Fiend. Hamid is another hope fiend. One of the images he returns to is the candle. “What’s important for him is that a candle is one of the very few tools that humanity still has, and hasn’t changed it at all,” Atabeigi observes. “And it’s gone through millennia, it’s gone through every kind of symbolism. It’s used for funerals, it’s used for celebrations, for everything.”
The art in a gallery is separated from daily life, suspended on vacant white walls. But a street artist chooses to enter the urban parade. Though he’s been referred to as “the Banksy of Iran,” Hamid’s work reminds me of the sly, utopian cartoons of Keith Haring.
With an ephemeral medium, photography is crucial. Hamid works closely with a photographer who calls herself “Pearl Camera” (her Instagram handle). She documents Hamid’s street interventions—many of which have since been erased—showing enough of the environment to suggest their effect on passersby. Photos will be in the exhibition, plus drawings and paintings, including some on recycled tarps.
Most graffiti is about promoting oneself, chasing “fame.” Mirza is the opposite: anonymous. He never signs his street pieces, and uses a pseudonym on his Instagram page. “Mirza” is a title referring to a scribe; “Hamid” is a common name that literally means “praiseworthy.” This is just the second show of his work anywhere. (The first was at the same gallery, last year.)
One pictures Iran as a brutal theocracy, but Mirza flourishes there. Videos show him decorating walls during daytime, sometimes even in downtown Tehran. (A video is included in the show.)
In 2021, Hamid began painting murals in an abandoned house in the Udlajan district of Tehran, once a neighborhood of prosperous Jewish merchants. The building was half-ruined, a home to vagrants. Eventually, the city painted over the walls, but Hamid returned and placed a QR code where each of the images had been, connected to a digital photo of the work. He calls it “The Gallery Without a Gallery.” Hamid has made the invisible visible.
This article appears in October 2023.
