Vahid Dastpak

I am an Iranian-Canadian painter and printmaker, based in Vancouver. An engineer by education and trade, I have considered art as my main vocation as far as I remember. In my late teens and early twenties, I attended painting classes by the Iranian master G.H. Saber. Until a few years ago I was mostly focused on drawing, particularly pen and ink on paper.

This naturally led to printmaking and etching, which opened new possibilities in terms of the technique and the market. In recent years I have been drawn back to painting, primarily in oils. In 2021 I quit my day job as a software engineer to fully dedicate myself to painting, realizing my lifelong dream. I have shown my work in several venues, including Malaspina Art Gallery, Dundarave Print Workshop Gallery, the Federation Gallery, the Architecture Center Gallery, Burnaby Art Gallery, Cityscape Community Art Space, Golestan Art Gallery in Tehran, and le Locle Fine Arts Museum in Switzerland.

The paintings presented here are mostly from the early to mid-2010s, a period in which I was strongly attracted to Greenberg’s formalist aesthetics. Given the works' planar and geometrical arrangements, like most geometrical abstract art in the past century, they owe a lot to Constructivists and Mondrian’s Neoplastic period, which, interestingly, borders the end of the European “La Belle Époque”!