The Artwork
Two of Me
2026
Sculptural Installation
Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration (1st floor lobby)
April 19 – May 17, 2026
Two of Me is a public art installation by Amir H. Fallah that presents the body as both structure and story. The figure, assembled from a visual lexicon spans the ancient and contemporary, the Eastern and Western, the intimate and the public. The work acts as both surface and archive of change.
Reflecting the immigrant experience of living between cultures, Two of Me holds past and present and assimilation and inheritance, in constant tension. Botanical patterns wrapping the form function as an armor and a skin. The work evokes regeneration, resilience, and interconnectedness. As the viewer moves around the work, the figure shifts, revealing multiple selves coexisting at once.
Through personal references reduced to silhouettes and deconstructed into traces that merge, fracture, and recombine, Two of Me becomes a portrait of a body in flux. The artist examines how identity is constructed, performed, and protected, and how our experiences become embedded within us.
Amir H. Fallah (b. 1979, Tehran, Iran) creates paintings, murals, sculptures, and installation that explore systems of representation embedded in the history of Western art. His ornate environments combine the visual vocabularies of painting and collage to deconstruct traditional notions of identity, while simultaneously defying expectations of portraiture by removing or obscuring the central figure. In many of his works, the absence of the sitter’s likeness is replaced with a broader representation of personhood—one that spans time and culture and is articulated through a network of symbols and imagery. The work questions not only the historical role of portraiture but also the cultural systems we use to define one another.
Fallah received his BFA in Fine Art and Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in Painting from the University of California, Los Angeles. Fallah is the founder and former creative director of the art and design publication Beautiful/Decay (1996–2013). He participated in the 9th Sharjah Biennial in 2009 and is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2015), the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship (2020), and an Artadia Award (2020).
His work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; de Young Museum; Birmingham Museum of Art; Jorge M. Pérez Collection; Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art; McEvoy Foundation for the Arts; Nerman Museum; SMART Museum of Art at the University of Chicago; Davis Museum; The Microsoft Collection; Cerritos College Public Art Collection; and the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, among other public and private collections. Fallah lives and works in Los Angeles.