The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMOCA) is hosting an exhibition of artworks by the late Iranian modernist painter Farideh Lashai.
A collection of 130 paintings, drawings, glasswork and video art from different phases of Lashai’s artistic activities are on display, Honaronline reported.
The exhibition, entitled ‘Towards the Ineffable’ opened on Friday, in the presence of Ali Jannati, minister of culture and Islamic guidance and Ali Moradkhani, art deputy and Majid Molla-Norouzi, head of visual arts department at the ministry, besides local and foreign guests.
The exhibition is co-curated by Italian art historian, critic and curator Germano Celant and Iranian curator, architect and filmmaker Faryar Javaherian.
This is the first time that a non-Iranian curator of great stature has curated an exhibit at the museum since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and “the museum plans to hold more exhibitions by international curators in the future,” said Molla-Norouzi.
Celant, who is the director of the Prada Foundation in Italy and a former senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, said that art exhibitions owe their existence to artists. “The current event has been made possible because of Farideh Lashai and the works she created”.
Lashai (1944-2013) was among the most successful Iranian artists, writers and translators, best known for her abstract paintings.
She studied art at the Academy of Decorative Arts in Vienna, Austria, and held over 100 solo and group exhibitions in Iran, Italy, Germany, the US, Switzerland, Britain and France. Her works are in private and public collections of the TMOCA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Lyrical Abstracts
She particularly won fame for her lyrical abstract paintings and multimedia installations that combined video projections and canvas works. She was inspired not only by her personal experiences, natural world and the rich artistic history of Persian art, but also by western artists of the modernist period.
“I have never painted from nature; in the sense of painting a landscape I can look at. The richness of nature amazes me, and amazement is the starting point for all artistic pursuits,” said Lashai in an interview with Canvas Magazine in 2007.
Her works have been sold at local and international auctions. This year, one of her abstract paintings was the catalogue cover of the Bonhams sale of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art in London in April, which went under the hammer for $47,000.
Another work by the artist became the most expensive painting sold on the first day of the 23rd exhibition of ‘100 Works, 100 Artists’ at Golestan Gallery in Tehran in July. It was sold for $8000.
Besides her works, a total of 40 artworks among the treasured collection of the TMOCA have been put on display. Works by great Iranian artists Manoucher Yektai, Sohrab Sepehri and Nasser Assar as well as western artists Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Alberto Giacometti and René Magritte are presented.
The exhibition will run through February 26 at the museum, next to Park Laleh, North Karegar Ave.
