Amir Mohammadzadeh

For Amir Mohammadzadeh, painting captures the external world – the realm of the positive – in an inherently outward-focussed manner, bound by translation even in abstraction. Drawing, conversely, represents a departure from exteriority: an exploration beyond the frame where the external world serves only as a conduit to delve into the realm of the negative and unseen. This practice manifests as a continuous, unbroken line – a singular stroke transgressing painting’s reliance on representation to move inward toward vision itself.

Mohammadzadeh asserts that drawing must define an ontological boundary with painting to avoid becoming its shadow. Where painting narrates the interior through the exterior, drawing reads the interior from the outside – revealing the distinct solitudes of the external world not through personal interiority, but from within the heart of exteriority itself. Drawing is, in essence, the translation of a translation.

His deep engagement with both drawing and music informs this pursuit. Recognising that music captures time’s progression whilst painting presents content instantaneously, Mohammadzadeh minimises this gap in his drawings. The surface becomes a musical score; lines, sequential placements, and spatial elements form orchestral structures. The work is deliberately not revealed all at once, unfolding temporally. For him, music equates to sound, painting to imagery, and drawing transcends painting entirely.

Structurally, this philosophy manifests through his rigorous exploration of positive/negative space using pencil – shaping ideas through crosshatching and nuanced tonal values. In stripping human figures of sexuality and identity, suspending them spatially, he critiques contemporary art’s human-centric zeitgeist. Thus, through marginalised mediums and structuralist principles, Mohammadzadeh elevates drawing beyond mere representation into a critical, temporal, and transcendent practice.