Iman Raad (Mashhad, Iran 1979) received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University (2017), was the Shandaken Projects’ Paint School fellow (2017-18) and artist in residence at the Queens Museum Studio Program (2018-20). He lives and works in New York City and teaches at The Cooper Union School of Art.

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 solo exhibitions include:
Josh Lilley Gallery (As if None of Us Had Ever Been Here Before), London (2022)
Sargent's Daughters Gallery (At the Earliest Ending of Winter), New York (2021)
Sargent's Daughters Gallery (Tongue Tied), New York (2017)
Dastan Gallery (Forty Drawings and So), Tehran (2016)

Recent exhibitions include:
Queensland Art Gallery (A Third Language), Brisbane, Australia (2023)
58th Carnegie International at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2022)
British Museum (Reflections), London, UK (2021)
Centro Cultural La Moneda (Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific), Santiago, Chile (2019)
The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at QAGOMA, Brisbane, Australia (2018)
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Standing Still, Lying Down, As If), Detroit, MI (2018)
The Flag Art Foundation in New York (2018)

(cf.http://www.imanraad.com)