Nicky Nodjoumi (b. 1941, Kermanshah, Iran) is a Brooklyn-based painter whose work engages the dynamics of power, displacement, and human behavior within broader social and political frameworks. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Tehran University of Fine Arts before relocating to the United States in the late 1960s, where he completed his MFA at The City College of New York in 1974. After a brief return to Tehran to teach, he settled permanently in New York in the early 1980s.
Please find here a link to the trailer of A Revolution on Canvas (2023), a HBO documentary about Nicky’s life and work.
Working primarily in painting, Nodjoumi has developed a distinctive figurative language that draws on historical reference, social observation, and the circulation of images in mass media. His compositions are carefully constructed scenes in which figures, animals, and architectural elements coexist in ambiguous, often unsettling relationships. Sourced and transformed from newspapers, art history, and memory, these elements are layered into pictorial spaces that resist fixed narratives and singular interpretations.
Nodjoumi’s paintings frequently operate as allegorical settings rather than depictions of specific events. Power is suggested through gesture, posture, and spatial tension, while humor and absurdity temper gravity. Figures appear simultaneously authoritative and exposed, embodying contradictions that reflect cycles of dominance, vulnerability, and collapse. Through this approach, Nodjoumi addresses collective experience shaped by political pressure and social instability while remaining attentive to the psychological dimensions of individual behavior.
Nicky Nodjoumi's works have been acquired by prominent institutional collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum in London, LACMA in Los Angeles, the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, among others. In 2024, Nicky had a solo exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts titled The Personal is Political, in 2019 a solo exhibition at the Kansas City Art Institute, titled The Long Day and in 2014, a solo exhibition at the Cleveland Institute of Art titled The Accident. His shows have been reviewed by major publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, and the Boston Review, among others.