University of California, Los Angeles’ Fowler Museum presents “Amir H. Fallah: The Fallacy of Borders”

Opening Jan. 29, the Fowler Museum at UCLA presents “Amir H. Fallah: The Fallacy of Borders,” the artist’s first museum exhibition in Los Angeles.

A celebration of Fallah’s vibrant maximalist style, more than 25 works of painting, sculpture and stained glass contend with urgent themes of cultural inheritance and identity formation. Fallah earned his master of fine arts in 2005 in painting at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. An opening celebration will take place Saturday, Jan. 28 from 6 to 9 p.m.

Born in 1979 in Tehran at the height of the Islamic Revolution, Fallah and his family moved several times before he arrived in the U.S. at the age of 7. Throughout his career, he has mined intimate aspects of his immigrant experience to forge an alternative portraiture, one that resists reductive characterization. This exhibition highlights the visual strategies and influences that underpin Fallah’s approach, which blends elements of his Iranian American heritage with those of other global traditions and their adaptations in Los Angeles’s diasporic communities.

Organized around eight thematic nodes, the Fowler presentation features collaborations, commissions and long-standing series in a range of media. Visitors can hear commentary by Fallah, exhibition curator Amy Landau, award-winning graphic designer Willem Henri Lucas, who is a professor emeritus of design media arts, and David Judson of Judson Studios be scanning QR codes on their phones.

“This exhibition spotlights Fallah’s broad visual literacy, experimental drive, and creative receptivity — all anchored in his migrant experience,” said Landau, director of interpretation and education at the Fowler. “He narrates from trauma and celebration, as well as his roles as a husband, father and confidant, which lends a deeply humane aspect to his social critique.”