Babak Ganjei makes paintings that read like pages torn from someone’s diary, if that someone had a habit of narrating their own anxieties in marker pen. After studying Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, he spent the best part of a decade in bands instead, playing guitar in Absentee and fronting Wet Paint, before drifting back into visual art via comics and the kind of text-based pieces he’s now best known for.
His paintings tend to catch a thought mid-spiral, the sort of line you’d normally keep to yourself, rendered in bold type and presented without apology. One piece began life as a joke on Twitter and somehow ended with film producers in his replies; another started as a doomed attempt to sell a painting of his own Barclaycard back to the bank. He also writes comics, hosts a radio show with his son on NTS, and once spent four years trying to offload a bundle of twigs on eBay (he got there eventually, for £82).
Print Club London stocks a selection of Ganjei’s screen prints and original artwork, each one carrying the same dry, slightly despairing humour that’s made his work hard to mistake for anyone else’s.
