Biography:

Saiers’ artistic resume includes a six-month solo exhibition at Alcatraz Prison and a one-year solo show at Harvard's Leverett House. His artwork has also been displayed in several New York City galleries including the Edwardian Room at the Plaza Hotel. In 2018, he installed a 9-foot inflatable rat featuring Bitcoin themes and code outside the Federal Reserve in New York City and it returned when Bitcoin hit 100,000. It was made an appearance at Jekyll Island. Other guerilla installations were placed at the MOMA, SEC, Walls Street’s Charging Bull, and The Met.. Previously, he ran a proprietary trading group at Deutsche Bank and later served as the Chief Investment Officer of a global derivatives-based hedge fund Saiers Capital (Alphabet). In 2011 his firm won the HFM Week award for top relative value hedge fund. Before working in finance, he completed his Ph.D. in mathematics in just one year at the age of 23 form University of Virgina.

Artistic philosophy:

Saiers' art draws inspiration from a range of subjects, portraying them through a mathematical lens that translates ideas into symbols and metaphors. With his expertise in mathematics, he develops a logical framework from which to distill down and then sum up complex ideas. To do so, he brings together seemingly disparate or disassociated concepts and subjects in a seamless and clean way.

.FAQ

1. There seem to be a ton of aspects to your work?

With a cubist painting you get glimpses of the object but not an exact replica of it.  Parts are painted from different perspectives, rearranged, some exaggerated, and others left out entirely. I often collage in enough details that if you are familiar with the idea you hopefully will be able to piece part of it together, but i often do intentionally rearrange or omit some of the details even with the math. My art is often a patchwork of information that is telling a story in a very abstract way with the use of word play metaphor and analogue.

2. You appear to have a wide variety of interests?

My interests tend to vary, and I find myself engrossed in different topics for extended periods of time. During my first three years of college, mathematics consumed my thoughts. However, in my senior year, I stumbled upon a book titled "Liar's Poker" and became fascinated with the trading game, which eventually took precedence over my mathematical pursuits. I spent my time reading everything I could about finance and even peripheral topics like card counting In the weeks leading up to my general exam, I was more focused on day trading tech stocks such as Dell and Compaq than mathematics, and this change in passion led me to head to Wall St. This period was also impacted by a significant personal event.

Following my graduation, I joined a derivative trading company called Susquehanna and eventually became the CIO of a global derivative trading firm. However, in 2013, my passion for art sparked, and it became a preoccupation that consumed my thoughts. Around that time, the renowned street artist Banksy did a residency in New York. Though my artistic style differs greatly from Banksy's, I believe the buzz surrounding his work propelled me even further into the world of art. At that point, I knew I needed to become a full-time artist. I have often said that you love what you most often daydream about, and this certainly holds true for me.

3.. You lived through some violent events as a child can you explain hopw they impact your work?

During my childhood, I lived in two countries that experienced significant conflict. In Ethiopia, civil wars erupted after the ousting (and eventual assassination) of Emperor Haile Selassie. Though I was too young to recall much, the events we experienced included being stopped at gunpoint with my mother and witnessing a mass killing outside our home involving machine guns. Later, we relocated to Afghanistan, where a coup led to the overthrow of the Afghan government and the assassination of our ambassador and the Afghan president (this was prior to the full-scale Soviet invasion a year later). The memories of this event still effect me to this day, including tank battles outside our home, fighter planes flying overhead, and tracer bullets passing through our backyard. These experiences have strongly influenced my antiwar stance, which has in turn informed a significant portion of my artwork.

4.. You worked on Wall St during 9/11. How has that impacted you?

Fortunately, none of my colleagues or friends were injured, but I was working for a derivative trading firm called Susquehanna in an office located five hundred yards away from the World Trade Center on 9/11. Initially, we were unaware of what was happening, and I stepped outside to witness the first building ablaze from a few blocks away. Upon the second building being struck, I decided to leave and headed towards Brooklyn before the towers tragically collapsed.

5. How has your art changed through the years?

For one Im less Wall St centric. From late 2015 to early 2018 I spent a large amount of artistic output on Wall St themes and my experiences in finance. The same is true for physics based art (2014-2016) like the series of works shown at Harvard in 2016-7. I also started incorporating more equations in my work and included more recent advances in math, ie ideas/theorems from the 20-21st centuries whereas really early in my career 2014-15 id use more classic results like Pick’s Theorem or the irrationality of PI. The way i use them is similar to my earlier math art, eg. word play, simile, metaphor, analogue, history etc., but the math concepts are newer. I think some of this has to do with my wanting the viewer to have an easier entry point into my art. So if Im using more classic concepts like the Basel problem, the irrationality of PI, Euler’s polyhedron formula, or Newton/Einstein’s ideas on physics it may be easier for the viewer to understand the concepts and get a better feel for whats being addressed in a particular piece. If i start with something less familiar like sheaf cohomology, spectral sequences, Brown Representation, or the Kervaire invariant problem its going to be harder for the viewer to grasp the concept as the math is likely completely foreign to them. At some point I felt my body of work was large enough that a viewer would have a basic roadmap of how i incorporate math into my work. The transformation really started to happen in late 2017 and 2018 when i start incorporating ideas like scheme and topos theory into my work eg in Napoleon Would Approve But Alexander Was Still Greater (several variants, large scale on a on flag 2019 and on a billboard in 2021 for the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s passing). I also, now, incorporate equations more freely whereas early on I was much more conservative and minimalistic in their use (eg I included only one equation, Pick’s Theorem, in my early piece Genocide is Evil (2014)). I think COVID also played an important role in this transition as I was less concerned about galleries and art shows. This allowed my art to become more esoteric. as it wasnt critically important for curators/art buyers to grasp the concept or fully understand what i was trying to accomplish. Another reason for this change came from my desire to address the notion of representation in art. Ill explain this more throughly later.

6. Do you have other hobbies?

As a 12-13 year old i teamed up with my dad to collect baseball cards. We focused on vintage cards and recently Ive incorporated some baseball themes in some of my work (or here) which include “borrowed” imagery from cards I knew growing up. As an adult, I would square large numbers (20 plus digits) (or here) especially after work when I worked in finance especially DB.

7. What is your favorite color?

It depends on the day but Im a big fan of cobalt blue.

8. Who are your favorite artists?

Michaelangelo and Cezanne