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The multidisciplinary artist, Khosro Berahmandi, of Iranian origin, arrived in Canada in 1983 at the age of twenty-two. Khosro lives and works in Tiohtia’ke – Montreal. Khosro studied Visual Arts at the University of Concordia in Montreal and the University of Paris VIII. He is a distinguished and prolific artist accomplishing over fifty group and solo exhibitions throughout the past three decades. His career has encompassed projects held in Canada, Europe, and the United States, with an accent upon interdisciplinary creation concerted with an international contingency of artists. 

Khosro is the recipient of the Charles Biddle Prize in 2022 for his contribution to the cultural and artistic development of Quebec society. Over the past 25 years, he has been actively involved in the life of Festival Accès Asie, a Montreal-based multidisciplinary art festival that promotes Asian arts, cultures, and histories. He worked for the festival as a curator, Managing Director, and Artistic Director since 1997. Khosro left his post in 2023 to focus on his artistic endeavors.

The art of Khosro Berahmandi enacts a microcosmic singularity, one derived from a personal mythology, that echoes the pictorial approach of the iconography of Indo-Iranian miniature painting  that constitutes a captivating and prodigious trial within the field of contemporaneous practice. His creative trajectory demarcates an exquisite aesthetic embodied in the perpetual labyrinth of aggregate and enigmatic beings, a semi-figurative “bestiary” which both challenges and fascinates audiences, as predominant aesthetic aspects born of Euro-centrism pale in contrast with his signatory innovations in leitmotif, poetical symbolism, and individual compositional strength.

The successive series, whether on wood or paper, evoke a transcendent quality, a personal mythology which exceed conventional iconography.  The works hold a universal appeal in their ambiguity of immediate reference, as if they echo a lost text once spoken and now whispered.

The renderings of the poetical imaginary, a sojourn where the artist gravitates, physically and psychically, upon detail: the minutiae of line, intensity of composition and proximity of material. A detail which voices a simultaneous spiritual ascent towards an intuitive augury of the sacred with the anonymity of a silent shaman.  Once connected to Khosro’s images, we suddenly encounter a personal cosmology which has proven to be the visual itinerary of a voyage possessed of itself, a tributary which has drawn deeply from diverse convergence, intersections, and sources.

The four decade’s long exile from his native Iran, where he never since returned, may suggest the wandering of a sensitive and serene individual somewhere dispossessed. Yet, without diaspora or nostalgia, the artist has embarked on an individual errant path that leads him towards an image that becomes his own territory. His creations silent testament to the singularity and subjectivity reality embraced, extemporal and resonant with visual composites of Universal themes. They suggest, with lucid speculation, that as iconography fails and art-historicism collapses, we might draw nearer a reality that reconciles the animal and the vegetal with the human.  The charted map hidden in the dense yet lustrous compositions of Khosro Berahmandi echo with eternal threads while are woven of the fabric of his singular sublime cosmos wherein his brushes reign.  -- This presentation of Khosro’s biography and his work is written by the art critic Rajath Suri