Nicky Nodjoumi (b. 1942, 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.

Working primarily in painting, Nodjoumi has developed a distinctive figurative language that draws on historical reference, social observation, and the circulation of images in mass media.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.

His work is held in major public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the British Museum, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; the Grey Art Gallery at New York University; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. His work has been widely reviewed in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, and Boston Review.