Mahmoud Hamadani

Mahmoud Hamadani (b. 1958, Iran) is an Iranian artist who lives in New York. Some of his monochromatic ink drawings on paper hold a rhythmic pattern within a grid, a line or a dot; in others the ink is blown across the sheet. He also makes sculpture, such as Fibonacci Cubes (2018), nested wire cubes in powder-coated steel.

Hamadani moved from Iran to the United States in the late 1970s and took a mathematics degree at the State University of New York at Oswego in 1981. He later served the United Nations in Afghanistan as a political adviser, then left that career for art, showing work from 1999. Three sources feed the drawings: the Fibonacci sequence, old Persian poetry and the traditions of Chinese painting. In his own account, Requiem, which includes Requiem for Kabul (2000), studies order and chaos. Traces studies chance and will, and Odes light and shadow.

His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the British Museum, London, where he took part in a group exhibition in 2006. He received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2004. Solo exhibitions include Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York (2004 and 2009), Art on 56th, Beirut (2023) and XVA Gallery, Dubai (2009 and 2024).