Queensland Art Gallery - Queensland Government

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian
Lightning for Neda
Over a career spanning decades, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian has
created an art imbued with the aesthetics of her Iranian culture. Inspired
by its architecture and the traditions of Islamic geometry and pattern,
and using media such as reverse-glass painting, mirror mosaic and relief
sculpture, Farmanfarmaian has revived and adapted these forms to
make original, compelling works. Clearly motivated to be an artist from
her teens, she enrolled in Tehran University’s Fine Arts College in the
early 1940s and then, at the age of 22, ventured to New York to study
fashion illustration at Parsons School of Design. Following graduation,
she pursued a career as a successful graphic and fashion designer and,
during her 12 years in New York (1945–57), Farmanfarmaian became
familiar with the city’s art scene — she met abstract expressionist Jackson
Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner, and a young Andy Warhol. In 1957, she
returned to Iran to develop her artistic career.
In Tehran, Farmanfarmaian also directed her prodigious energy
towards collecting. Assembled throughout the 1960s and 1970s, her
collection reflected both her unconventional interests and informed
and consolidated her aesthetic concerns. To this end, she gathered a
group of highly coloured images prevalent in Tehran’s coffee houses 1
and a significant group of tribal and antique reverse-glass paintings, as
well as Turkoman tribal textiles and silver jewellery. 2 She also collected
architectural fragments, such as doors, windows and wall panels. These
latter pieces were salvaged from historic buildings (domestic as well
as public) that were being demolished in her hometown of Qazvin,
and in other cities in Iran, as part of the process of modernisation.
Much of this was done to recover material culture that was rapidly
disappearing, with the aim of gifting to Iranian state art collections.
Immersing herself in this material and developing her own artistic
language became interdependent activities for Farmanfarmaian,
maturing into a unique practice.
The characteristic mirror mosaic of Farmanfarmaian’s work is an
Iranian decorative technique known as aineh-kari. As curator Rose
Issa has explained:
to structure and develop complex architectural ornamentation. Arab
mathematicians of the ninth century added considerably to Greek and
Indian scholarship, and Muslim craftspeople have long relied on this
knowledge to produce the myriad patterns embellishing the facades
and walls of buildings. In this work, the six sides of the hexagon
provide an underlying structure, and are expanded and elaborated on
as a repeated motif.
The mystical and symbolic connotations assigned to numbers in
Islamic culture are based on the profound symmetry that the grammar
of mathematics offers, a great inspiration for Islamic scholars. In this
way the point of origin is the dot; it also signifies the primordial, the
one, the permanent, the eternal. The line connecting two dots is
understood as a symbol of the polarity of existence, the first move
or direction, and therefore the intellect. From here, the plethora of
geometric shapes expands to include the circle, the triangle (the
isosceles and the equilateral each offering different possibilities),
and so on. The hexagon represents the six directions of motion (up,
down, forwards, backwards, right, left), and the six virtues: generosity,
self-discipline, patience, determination, insight and compassion. In
each of the six panels constituting Lightning for Neda, Farmanfarmaian
uses over 4000 mirror shards to activate a myriad of patterns across a
glittering and sublime surface.
Neda means ‘voice’ in Farsi and, in this work, the compelling voice of
an octogenarian Iranian artist acknowledges the turmoil facing her
country. Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian has herself experienced
the trauma of exile, leaving Tehran in the wake of the 1979 Iranian
Revolution, and returning in 2003 to rebuild her life there. Although all
her works and collections were confiscated in 1979, her strength as an
artist could not be curbed. Thus, in the splendour of Farmanfarmaian’s
vision, the majestic spirit of affirmation also lives.
Suhanya Raffel
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian
Iran b.1924
Lightning for Neda (detail) 2009
Mirror mosaic, reverse glass painting, plaster on wood /
6 panels: 300 x 200cm (each) / Commissioned for APT6
and the Queensland Art Gallery Collection. The artist
dedicates this work to the loving memory of her late
husband Dr Abolbashar Farmanfarmaian / Purchased
2009. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection:
Queensland Art Gallery
The technique dates back to the 16th century, when mirrors were
imported from Venice and Bohemia to Iran and arrived broken.
The new owners had to find imaginative ways of recycling these
shards of glass, and would set the pieces in stucco to create
decorative panels with attractive multiple reflections. As well as Sufi
symbolism of reflecting the self, mirror has since been associated
with purity, brightness, symmetry, veracity and fortune. 3
In Lightning for Neda 2009, Farmanfarmaian has constructed her most
ambitious work to date. Commissioned for the Gallery’s Collection and
premiering in APT6, its six panels of intricate mirror mosaic explore
the geometric possibilities afforded by the hexagon. Essentially
abstract, Lightning for Neda draws on the Islamic use of geometry
Endnotes
1 Coffee houses in Tehran are traditionally male-only establishments. Their walls are
generally hung with stylised, highly coloured paintings of religious and national
heroes. These works are identified as being made at the cusp of the Constitutional
Revolution (1906–11).
2 The Turkoman are a formerly nomadic tribal people from the region encompassing
Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, northern Iraq and north-eastern Iran.
3 Rose Issa, Mosaics of Mirrors: Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Nazar Research
and Cultural Institute, Tehran, 2006, pp.14–15.
84 85