About the artist
The Austrian artist was born in 1956 near the Caspian Sea in Persia. As a child he painted landscapes and portraits in charcoal and with pastel crayons.
After the secondary school education he began to study industrial accounting in Teheran - not because of his own wishes,- no, the school system prescribed this path for him - yet all the while he was continuing to paint and to develop his talents.
Looking for a way out, Bahadoori travelled to Europe. He is living in Germany and Vienna since 1979. With the aim of completing his studies quickly, Bahadoori enrolled at the Academy of International Trade and Commerce in Vienna. Yet he dropped out two years later, deciding to dedicate himself only to painting.
1983 - 1986 he was the assistant of the famous artist Gottfried Helnwein and learned different techniques of painting.
1984 Bahadoori began his artistic work as a free artist. He develops his own technique with aquarelle colours, oil and acryl.
In the year 1995 he stayed with Robert Schöller in Florida.
2001 he lives in the United States and becomes famous with several exhibitions. There his artistic work was also shown several years before.
With the beginning of the year 2002 he returns to Vienna, here he still lives and realizes also very interesting restorations, for example the Vieux Laque room of the famous Castle of Schönbrunn in Vienna. His atelier is situated in the third Viennese district in the Neulinggasse 19. There you can meet the famous painter and you can admire his fascinating pictures there.
The focus of his work is not only the artistic painting, but also the restoration of special wall paintings and his own way of illusions wall painting. He paints also very interesting portrait pictures in a fascination combination of reality and illusion. These portraits he realizes only as ordered works.
Contemplation of his artistic work
(written by Werner Buhre, Vienna)
Beauty can be painful. Apollinaire, Dante Aligheri, C.D. Friedrich, Monet, Albinoni, Bach and other famous people knew this. And yet in our age beauty is driven to the threshold of pain as a “secret” that once sunk into oblivion.
What is this secret?
Perhaps it is the yearning without the realization of the object of covetousness. Just before the soul can finally take possession of the stirred object, one's power is dissipated. Although the enraptured seeker is so close to the flame of his desire, on the very edge of his longing, where he can breathe the scent of the object of his love all of it slips away before the embrace (that had seemed so certain) can occur, leaving behind the nervous pounding of the heart...
The traveller in his search for beauty and desire collapses under the unbearable tension of being on the verge of the conquest of paradise - for he suddenly knows that it can never be attained. The absolute wishes always remain beyond his grasp.
Now that you have been sufficiently warned, gentle reader, the phenomenon described above can take effect as you contemplate the work of Behruz Bahadoori.
Bahadoori interprets nature as a mirror of the human soul. His landscapes are always a product of the imagination, never copies of the natural world. The de-personified use of allegory and wealth of symbolism - every element of his compositions is a carrier of meaning - do not appear as the result of an extensive search, but rather, as innocent discoveries. The open fields and skies of his paintings do not bear the heavy yoke of contrived allegory, but spring forth, as in a dream, from the artist's depiction of the essence of nature.
The pictures invite the viewer to enter and wander through them in contemplative privacy. Has nature reawakened to life intact? Or has it yet to pass through the stages of human exploitation? Lush groves of trees and wide expanses of water, sunlit ravines under a roof of clouds dream of purity, freedom from injury, delicacy - and of struggle! The path that leads through the space of a pictures marked by a rock formation or a tree exposed to a relentless tempest, braving all storms.
For the most part, nature has rid itself of man in the pictures of Bahadoori. And so the viewer is once again able to enter and experience a 'purified' paradise, but this time with all the necessary circumspection and all due respect toward plant and animal life (as well as toward him). As one strolls through Bahadoori's pictures, one notices that the way the artist depicts nature suggests - evens demands - a biologically-oriented gentleness. In this sense the artist devotes his work not only to the earth, but to its inhabitants as well.
At first sight, one might be tempted to quickly classify Behruz Bahadoori's work as neo-impressionistic. And yet his pictures are not solely concerned with the sensitive depiction of the feelings and perceptions of the moment, but rather, with the hope of preserving the natural world subjugated to the will of mankind. In essence, his pictures are places of catharsis. The work of Bahadoori would be more appropriately classified as formally unconstrained symbolism, presented with a delicate, impressionistic use of colour and a romantic inventory of feelings.