Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (2015)

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (born December 16, 1922 in Qazvin , Iran , † April 20, 2019 in Tehran , Iran) was an Iranian artist who collected traditional folk art. She is regarded as one of the most important contemporary Iranian artists, and she is the first artist to create a style that blends the geometric patterns and cut mosaic techniques of Iran with the rhythms of modern Western geometric abstraction. In 2017, the Monir Museum in Tehran, Iran, was opened in her honor .

life and career

Shahroudy was born in 1922 to educated parents in the religious city of Qazvin in northwestern Iran. Farmanfarmaian acquired her artistic skills early in her childhood, taking drawing lessons from a tutor and studying postcard rendering of Western art. After graduating from the Fine Arts Faculty of Tehran University in 1944, she took a steamboat to New York City when World War II ruined plans to study art in Paris . In New York she studied at Cornell University , at Parsons The New School for Design , where she focused on fashion drawing.

As a freelance fashion illustrator, she worked with various magazines such as Glamor before she came to the Bonwit Teller department store, where she met the young Andy Warhol . In addition, she learned more about the art through her museum visits and encounters with the Eighth Street Club and the New York avant-garde art scene, by meeting artists and contemporaries such as Louise Nevelson , Jackson Pollock , Willem de Kooning , Barnett Newman and Joan Mitchell befriended.

In early 1957, Farmanfarmaian moved back to Iran. Inspired by home décor, she discovered a fascination for the tribal and folk art tradition of her country's history, which made her rethink the past and find a new way for her art. In the years that followed, she continued to develop her style by making mirror mosaics and abstract monotypes, exhibiting her work in the Iran Pavilion at the 1958 Biennale di Venezia , and holding a series of exhibitions at places such as Tehran University (1963), the Iran-America- Society (1973) and the Jacques Kaplan / Mario Ravagnan Gallery (1974).

In 1979, Farmanfarmaian traveled to New York to visit family. Around the same time, the Islamic Revolution began and it was driven out of Iran. She remained in exile for 20 years. Farmanfarmaian tried to reconcile their mirror mosaics with the limited resources available in the US, but lack of materials and comparatively inexperienced workers limited their work. Therefore, she placed more emphasis on her other aspects of art, such as commissions, textile design and drawing.

In 1992 Farmanfarmaian returned to Iran. In 2004 she gathered former and new employees to help design her mosaics. From 2014 she lived and worked in Tehran , where she died in her home in April 2019 at the age of 96.

Farmanfarmaian married the Iranian artist Manoucher Yektai in 1950. They divorced in 1953. In 1957 she returned to Tehran to marry the lawyer Abolbashar Farmanfarmaian. In 1991 Abolbashar died of leukemia . She has two daughters, Nima and Zahra.

While living in Iran, Farmanfarmaian was also an avid collector. She collected paintings behind glass, traditional tribal jewelry, and pottery and had one of the largest collections of "coffeehouse paintings" - commissioned coffeehouse paintings by folk artists. Most of their works and their folk art collections were confiscated, sold or destroyed.

Exhibitions

Farmanfarmaian's work has been publicly exhibited in international museums including: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum , Grand Rapids Art Museum, Leighton House Museum, Haus der Kunst, Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Zentrum Paul Klee , SCAD Museum of Art. Her work has been in private galleries such as The Third Line, Dubai and New York; Gray Art Gallery, New York; Denise Rene Gallery, Paris and New York; Lower Belvedere, Vienna; and Ota Fine Art, Tokyo.

Farmanfarmaian participated in the 29th São Paulo Biennale (2010), the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2009) and the Venice Biennale (1958, 1966 and 2009).

Suzanne Cotter curated Farmanfarmaian's work for her first major museum retrospective, entitled Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings, 1974–2014 , on display at the Serralves Museum (also known as Fundação de Serralves) in Porto, Portugal (2014/2015), then traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City (2015) . This was Farmanfarmaian's first major US museum exhibition.

The most important commissioned works include works for the Queensland Art Gallery (2009), the Victoria and Albert Museum (2006), the Dag Hammarskjöld Building, New York (1981) and the Niyavaran Cultural Center (1977/1978) as well as acquisitions by the Metropolitan Museum of Art , the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo .

Awards

• 1958: Gold medal at the Venice Biennale (Iranian pavilion)
• Farmanfarmaian was named one of the BBC's "100 Women" in 2015.

Collections

Farmanfarmaian's work can be found in several public art collections worldwide including: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) , Museum of Fine Arts, Houston , Tate Modern , Queensland Art Gallery and others.

In December 2017, the Monir Museum opened in Negarestan Park Gardens in Tehran, Iran , and is dedicated to the presentation of the works of Farmanfarmaian. With a collection of 51 works donated by the artist, the Monir Museum's collection is managed by the University of Tehran.

bibliography

Farmanfarmaian's autobiography is titled A Mirror Garden: A Memoir and was co-authored by Zara Houshmand (Knopf, 2007). Her work is documented in the book Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Cosmic Geometry (Damiani Editore & The Third Line, 2011), with a detailed interview by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and critical essays by Nader Ardalan, Media Farzin and Eleanor Sims, tributes from Farmanfarmaian's friends Etel Adnan, Siah Armajani, Caraballo-Farman, Golnaz Fathi, Hadi Hazavei, Susan Hefuna, Aziz Isham, Rose Issa, Faryar Javaherian, Abbas Kiarostami, Shirin Neshat, Donna Stein and Frank Stella. It is mentioned in an excerpt from The Sense of Unity: The Sufi Tradition in Persian Architecture by Nader Ardalan and Laleh Bakhtiar (1973), and there is an annotated timeline of the life of Farmanfarmaian by Negar Azimi.

Movie

The film Monir (2014) by Bahman Kiarostami is a documentary about the life and work of Farmanfarmaian.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ [1] . ArtNet, biography
2. ↑ [2] . ArtNet, works of art
3. ↑ HG Masters: Obituary: Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1922-2019). In: ArtAsiaPacific. ArtAsiaPacific, April 21, 2019, accessed April 22, 2019 . 
4. ↑ [3] . BBC