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Monir farmanfarmaian
About the Artist
Monir Farmanfarmaian (b. 1922, Qazvin, Iran – d. 2019, Tehran, Iran) was a pioneering figure in Iranian art. Her work was groundbreaking in its experimentation and dialogue with Persian geometric practice and traditions.
Known as Monir, the artist studied at both Cornell and Parsons in New York, having left Iran during the Second World War to pursue her education.
She became deeply involved in what was then the core of the avant-garde alongside artists such as Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. She returned to Iran to marry her husband, Abol-bashar Farmanfarmaian, prince and descendant of Qarar-era shahs, but was exiled due to his status as a perceived enemy of the Islamic Revolution. She only went back to Iran in 2003, after his death. In 2017, the Monir Museum became the first museum in Iran solely dedicated to a woman when she donated more than fifty of her works to the private collection of Tehran University.
Globally recognised for her mirror and glass mosaics, Monir draws on a historical tradition that can be traced back to the sixteenth century. Her technique was inspired by a visit to the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz in 1966, where she was struck by the tradition of Persian ayeneh-kari work. Ayeneh-kari involves covering an architectural material such as plaster with mosaics of mirror glass. The process entails the transformation of an ordinary, seemingly mundane, material into something spectacular and ethereal.
The curator Hans Ulrich Obrist noted in Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Cosmic Geometry, (2011), ‘Monir is an active participant in the protest against forgetting. Her work serves to activate memory – a memory that is as multi-dimensional as the artist herself. In this respect she has been a role model for the artist of the twenty-first century since the 1950s.’
Monir Farmanfarmaian in the studio
Courtesy the estate of the artist
WORKS IN THE COLLECTION
Monir Farmanfarmaian, "Stars", 2005
Mirror, reverse glass painting on plaster on wood, 50 x 90 cm
Courtesy the estate of the artist
Stars (2005) showcases the artist’s dialogue with Persian tradition, contemporary art making and cosmic geometry. As in much of her work, Monir recontextualises the past, moving away from architectural dependence; the mirror glass becomes a perceptual artwork in itself. The stars, circles and continuous, looping curves evoke a divine wisdom, of infinite beauty, while the red and green tones set against grey and white reflect the colours of Iran’s urban landscape.
The artist footnotes her work with a quatrain by Omar Khayyam, a Persian mathematician, astronomer and poet from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. He was known for his treatise on cubic equations and was famously translated from Persian into English in 1859 by Edward FitzGerald in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
The footnote reads:
https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/25461/lot/29/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.