The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art will hold a commemoration ceremony for the late Iranian modernist painter, Farideh Lashai, coinciding with the closing day of her exhibition of artworks on February 26.
On November 21, 2015, the museum opened Lashai’s exhibition titled ‘Towards the Ineffable’, a collection of 130 paintings, drawings, glasswork and video art from different phases of the late artist’s activities, ‘Tandis’ Persian art magazine reported.
The exhibition opened in the presence of Ali Jannati, minister of culture and Islamic guidance, Ali Moradkhani, art deputy and Majid Molla-Norouzi, head of visual arts department at the ministry, besides local and foreign guests.
According to a report on the event by ‘Artnet’ website, the TMoCA “is an inverse version of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York, the galleries spiraling downwards (as opposed to upwards) into the ground. The design is hard to navigate and lights are in short supply, though it’s a big, quiet space with enough flexibility to show off a variety of artwork in all mediums. Lashai’s art looks good in here and overall the show makes a wonderful, very positive statement about the commitment of the museum to programming the best, most challenging international and local modern and contemporary art.”
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.
The closing ceremony, slated for February 26, will be attended by veteran art figures and Lashai’s close friends, including painter, author and art critic Aydin Aghdashlou, film director and screenwriter, Nasser Taghavai, painter Raana Farnood, veteran architect and exhibition curator, Faryar Javaherian and Maneli Keikavousi, daughter of Lashai.
