Iman Raad (Mashhad, Iran 1979) received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University (2017), and was the Shandaken Projects’ Paint School fellow (2017-18). He is currently a resident at the Queens Museum Studio Program, and an adjunct faculty at The Cooper Union School of Art. He lives and works in New York City. Iman Raad works across a variety of media, including painting, drawing, embroidery, graphic work and performance lectures. In these diverse works, he draws on influences such as Persian painting, Mughal painting, South-Asian Truck painting and internet image culture. He combines these local references with contemporary subject matter to create his mural-like installations. Using a vivid, high key palette, altered perspective, and repetition that mimics digital glitches, the result is a riot of colour and movement that is both seductive and unsettling. Traditionally ornamental elements such as birds, fruits and flowers are recalibrated into subjects that carry narrative import and are given animate, unnatural presences. These are intertwined with social events and historical moments rendered in fantastical ways to draw in the viewer. Aside from painting, Raad is also an internationally acknowledged graphic designer, included in The Phaidon archive of five hundred designs that matter, representing the contemporary Persian graphic design movement. His recent solo exhibitions include Tongue Tied, Sargent's Daughters Gallery, New York (2017) and Forty Drawings and So, Dastan Gallery, Tehran (2016). Recent exhibitions include group show at The Flag Art Foundation in New York (Sep 2018), Standing Still, Lying Down, As If at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) (Oct 2018), and the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in QAGOMA Brisbane, Australia (Nov 2018) and Centro Cultural La Moneda, Santiago, Chile (Aug 2019).