April 2018

AZIZ ART
April 2018
Siah Armajani
Anselm Kiefer
Morteza Momayez

1-Siah Armajani
5-Anselm Kiefer
17-Morteza Momayez
Director: Aziz Anzabi
Editor : Nafiseh Yaghoubi
Translator : Asra Yaghoubi
Research: Zohreh Nazari
http://www.aziz-anzabi.com

Siah Armajani
Sia (Siavash) Armajani born 1939
is an Iranian-born American
sculptor and architect known for
his public art.
One of Armajani's important
projects is located at North Shore
Esplanade at St. George's Ferry
Terminal, Staten Island, NY.
Armajani has said:
Biography
Siah Armajani, Bridge/Ramp,
1994, Stuttgart-Mitte, Innenhof
der LBBW, beim Hauptbahnhof
Siavash Armajani was born in
1939 in Tehran. In 1960,
Armajani immigrated to the
United States to attend college,
as he had family living in the US.
Siah Armajani designed the
Olympic Torch presiding over the
1996 Summer Olympics in
Atlanta, Georgia, United States.
He has worked on other projects
such as the New York Staten
Island tower and bridge,
the Round Gazebo in Nice,
France, and the Irene Hixon
Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, United States.
His 2005 work, Fallujah, is a
modern take on Picasso's Guernica
but has been censored in the U.S.
due to its critical view of the war in
Iraq.
"All buildings and all streets are
ornaments. Moreover, the
lighthouse and bridge gives a place
to the representational arts of
poetry, music, and performing. By
embracing all of the arts, the
lighthouse and bridge asserts its
own perspective everywhere."
In 2010, he won a Knight Fellow
award granted by United States
Artists.
An exhibition at Muelensteen
Gallery in 2011 presented a dozen
of Armajani's early pieces created
in the years leading up to his arrival
in America.
1

Many employ ink or watercolor on cloth or paper, and incorporate text.
In his "Shirt" (1958), Armajani uses pencil and ink to completely cover
his father's shirt in Persian script.
Several of his works are held by the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Anselm Kiefer
(born 8 March 1945) is a German
painter and sculptor. He studied
with Joseph Beuys and Peter
Dreher during the 1970s. His
worksincorporate materials such
as straw, ash, clay, lead, and
shellac. The poems of Paul Celan
have played a role in developing
Kiefer's themes of German history
and the horror of the Holocaust,
as have the spiritual concepts of
Kabbalah.
In his entire body of work, Kiefer
argues with the past and
addresses taboo and controversial
issues
from recent history. Themes from
Nazi rule are particularly reflected
in his work; for instance, the
painting "Margarethe" (oil and
straw on canvas) was inspired by
Paul Celan's well-known poem
"Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue").
His works are characterised by an
unflinching willingness to confront
his culture's dark past, and
unrealised potential, in works that
are often done on a large,
confrontational scale well
suited to the subjects. It is also
characteristic of his work to find
signatures and/or names of
people of historical importance,
legendary
figures or historical places. All of
these are encoded sigils through
which Kiefer seeks to process the
past; this has resulted in his work
being linked with the movements
New Symbolism and Neo–
Expressionism.
Kiefer has lived and worked in
France since 1992. Since 2008, he
has lived and worked primarily in
Paris and in Alcácer do Sal,
Portugal.
Early life and career
The son of a German art
teacher,Kiefer was born in
Donaueschingen two months
before the end of World War II. In
1951, his family moved to
Ottersdorf, and he attended public
school in Rastatt, graduating high
school in 1965. He entered
University of Freiburg, and studied
pre-Law and Romance languages.
However, after 3 semesters he
switched to Art, studying at Art
academies in Freiburg, Karlsruhe,
and Düsseldorf. In Karlsruhe, he
studied under Peter Dreher, an
important realist and figurative
painter.He received an Art degree
in 1969. 5

Kiefer moved to Düsseldorf in
1970. In 1971 he moved to
Hornbach, in southwestern
Germany, where he established a
studio. He remained there until
1992; his output during this first
creative time is known as The
German Years. In 1992 he
relocated to France.
Work
Photography
Kiefer began his career as a
photographer with performances
in which he, in paramilitary
costume, mimicked the Nazi salute
on various locations in France,
Switzerland and Italy calling for
Germans to remember and to
acknowledge the loss to their
culture through the mad
xenophobia of the Third Reich. In
1969, at Galerie am Kaiserplatz,
Karlsruhe, he presented his first
single exhibition "Besetzungen
(Occupations)" with a series of
photographs about controversial
political actions.
Painting and sculpture
Kiefer is best known for his
paintings, which have grown
increasingly large in scale with
additions of lead, broken glass, and
dried flowers or plants, resulting in
encrusted surfaces and thick layers
of impasto
By 1970, while studying informally
under Joseph Beuys at
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf,his
stylistic leanings resembled Georg
Baselitz's approach. He worked
with glass, straw, wood and plant
parts. The use of these materials
meant that his art works became
temporary and fragile, as Kiefer
himself was well aware; he also
wanted to showcase the materials
in such a way that they were not
disguised and could be represented
in their natural form. The fragility of
his work contrasts with the stark
subject matter in his paintings. This
use of familiar materials to express
ideas was influenced by Beuys, who
used fat and carpet felt in his
works. It is also typical of the Neo-
Expressionist style.
Kiefer returned to the area of his
birthplace in 1971. In the years that
followed, he incorporated German
mythology in particular in his work,
and in the next decade he argued
with the Kabbalah.

He went on extended journeys
throughout Europe, the USA and
the Middle East; the latter two
journeys further influenced his
work. Besides paintings, Kiefer
created sculptures, watercolors,
woodcuts, and photographs.
Throughout the 1970s and early
1980s, Kiefer made numerous
paintings, watercolors, woodcuts,
and books on themes interpreted
by Richard Wagner in his fouropera
cycle Der Ring des
Nibelungen (The Ring of the
Nibelung).In the early 1980s, he
created more than thirty
paintings, painted photographs,
and watercolors that refer in their
titles and inscriptions to the
Romanian Jewish writer Paul
Celan's poem "Todesfuge"
("Death Fugue").
A series of paintings which Kiefer
executed between 1980 and 1983
depict looming stone edifices,
referring to famous examples of
National Socialist architecture,
particularly buildings designed by
Albert Speer and Wilhelm Kreis.
The grand plaza in To the Unknown
Painter (1983) specifically refers to
the outdoor courtyard of Hitler's
Chancellery in Berlin, designed
by Speer in 1938 in honor of the
Unknown Soldier. In 1984–85, he
made a series of works on paper
incorporating manipulated blackand-white
photographs of desolate
landscapes with utility poles and
power lines. Such works, like Heavy
Cloud (1985), were an indirect
response to the controversy in
West Germany in the early 1980s
about NATO's stationing of tactical
nuclear missiles on German soil and
the placement of nuclear fuel
processing facilities.
By the mid-1980s, Kiefer’s themes
widened from a focus on
Germany's role in civilisation to the
fate of art and culture in general.
His work became more sculptural
and involved not only national
identity and collective memory, but
also occult symbolism, theology
and mysticism. The theme of all the
work is the trauma experienced by
entire societies, and the continual
rebirth and renewal in life. During
the 1980s his paintings became
more physical, and featured
unusual textures and materials.The
range of his themes broadened to
include references to ancient
Hebrew and Egyptian history,

as in the large painting Osiris and
Isis (1985–87). His paintings of the
1990s, in particular, explore the
universal myths of existence and
meaning rather than those of
national identity.From 1995 to
2001, he produced a cycle of large
paintings of the cosmos.He also
started to turn to sculpture,
although lead still remains his
preferred medium.
Since 2002, Kiefer has worked
with concrete, creating the towers
destined for the Pirelli warehouses
in Milan, the series of tributes to
Velimir Khlebnikov (paintings of
the sea, with boats and an array
of leaden objects, 2004-5),
a return to the work of Paul Celan
with a series of paintings featuring
rune motifs (2004–6), and other
sculptures. In 2006, Kiefer’s
exhibition, Velimir Chlebnikov,
was first shown in a small studio
near Barjac, then moved to White
Cube in London, then finishing in
the Aldrich Contemporary Art
Museum in Connecticut. The work
consists of 30 large (2 x 3 meters)
paintings, hanging in two banks of
15 on facing walls of an expressly
constructed corrugated steel
building that mimics the studio in
which they were created. The work
refers to the eccentric theories of
the Russian futurist
philosopher/poet Velimir
Chlebnikov, who invented a
"language of the future" called
"Zaum", and who postulated that
cataclysmic sea battles shift the
course of history once every 317
years. In his paintings, Kiefer’s toylike
battleships—misshapen,
battered, rusted and hanging by
twisted wires—are cast about by
paint and plaster waves. The work’s
recurrent color notes are black,
white, gray, and rust; and their
surfaces are rough and slathered
with paint, plaster, mud and clay.
In 2009 Kiefer mounted two
exhibitions at the White Cube
gallery in London. A series of forest
diptychs and triptychs enclosed in
glass vitrines, many filled with
dense Moroccan thorns, was titled
Karfunkelfee, a term from German
Romanticism stemming from a
poem by the post-war Austrian
writer Ingeborg Bachmann. In The
Fertile Crescent, Kiefer presented a
group of epic paintings inspired by
a trip to India fifteen years earlier

where he first encountered rural
brick factories. Over the past
decade, the photographs that
Kiefer took in India "reverberated"
in his mind to suggest a vast array
of cultural and historical
references, reaching from the
first human civilization of
Mesopotamia to the ruins of
Germany in the aftermath of the
Second World War, where he
played as a boy. "Anyone in search
of a resonant meditation on the
instability of built grandeur",
wrote the historian Simon
Schama in his catalogue essay,
"would do well to look hard at
Kiefer’s The Fertile Crescent".
In Morgenthau Plan (2012), the
gallery is filled with a sculpture of a
golden wheat field, enclosed in a
five-meter-high steel cage.
Books
Beginning in 1969 Kiefer also
worked on book design. Early
examples are typically worked-over
photographs; his more recent
books consist of sheets of lead
layered with paint, minerals, or
dried plant matter. For example, he
assembled numerous lead books on
steel shelves in libraries, as symbols
of the stored, discarded knowledge
of history. The book Rhine (1981)
comprises a sequence of 25
woodcuts that suggest a journey
along the Rhine River; the river is
central to Germany's geographical
and historical development,
acquiring an almost mythic
significance in works such as
Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungs.
Scenes of the unspoiled river are
interrupted by dark, swirling pages
that represent the sinking of the
battleship Bismarck in 1941, during
an Atlantic sortie codenamed Rhine
Exercise.

Studios
sculptures that correspond to
Kiefer's first studio was his home monumental constructions in the
in Hornbach, a large converted surrounding woodland, and
brick factory. In 1991 he left serpentine excavated labyrinths
Hornback to spend time
with great earthy columns that
traveling in Japan, Mexico and resemble stalagmites or termite
India. In 1992 he established mounds. Nowhere is it clear where
himself in Barjac, France, the finished product definitively
where he transformed his 35- stands; perhaps it is all work in
hectare studio compound La progress, a monumental conceptart
organism."
Ribaute into a Gesamtkunstwerk.
A derelict silk factory, his studio is During 2008, Kiefer left his studio
enormous and in many ways is a complex at Barjac and moved to
comment on industrialization. He Paris. A fleet of 110 lorries
created there an extensive system transported his work to a 35,000 sq
of glass buildings, archives, ft (3,300 m2) warehouse on the
installations, storerooms for Périphérique in Croissy-Beaubourg,
materials and paintings,
outside Paris, that had once been
subterranean chambers and the depository for the La
corridors.
Samaritaine department
Sophie Fiennes filmed Kiefer's store.Victoria Stapley-Brown
studio complex in Barjac for her (August 31, 2016),Anselm Kiefer’s
documentary study, Over Your studio robbed of 12 tonnes of raw
Cities Grass Will Grow (2010), marble and €1.3m lead sculpture
which recorded both the
The Art Newspaper. A journalist
environment and the artist at work. wrote of Kiefer's abandoned studio
One critic wrote of the film: complex: "He left behind the great
"Building almost from the ground work of Barjac – the art and
up in a derelict silk factory, Kiefer buildings. A caretaker looks after it.
devised an artistic project Uninhabited, it quietly waits for
extending over acres: miles of nature to take over, because, as we
corridors, huge studio spaces with know, over our cities grass will
ambitious landscape paintings and grow.

Exhibitions
In 1969, Kiefer had his first solo
exhibition, at Galerie am
Kaiserplatz in Karlsruhe.
Along with Georg Baselitz, he
represented Germany at the
Venice Biennale in 1980. He was
also featured in the 1997 Venice
Biennale with a one-man show
held at the Museo Correr,
concentrating on paintings and
books.
Comprehensive solo exhibitions of
Kiefer's work have been organized
by the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
(1984); Art Institute of Chicago
(1987); Sezon Museum of Art in
Tokyo (1993);
Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin
(1991); Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York (1998); Fondation
Beyeler in Basel (2001); the
Modern Art Museum
of Fort Worth (2005);
the Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden in Washington
D.C. (2006); the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art and the
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
(2007). In 2007, the Guggenheim
Museum Bilbao presented an
extensive survey of recent work.
Several of his works were exhibited
in 2009 for the first time in the
Balearic Islands, in the museum Es
Baluard in Palma de Mallorca. In
2012, the Art Gallery of Hamilton
presented some of his
paintings.London's Royal Academy
of Arts mounted the first British
retrospective of the artist's work in
September 2014.
In 2007 Kiefer was commissioned
to create a huge site-specific
installation of sculptures and
paintings for the inaugural
"Monumenta" at the Grand Palais,
Paris.With the unveiling of a
triptych – the mural Athanor and
the two sculptures Danae and
Hortus Conclusus – at the Louvre in
2007, Kiefer became the first living
artist to create a permanent sitespecific
installation in the museum
since Georges Braque in 1953. In
2008, Kiefer installed Palmsonntag
(Palm Sunday) (2006), a
monumental palm tree and 36
steel-and-glass reliquary tablets in
the auditorium-gym of the First
Baptist Church of Los Angeles, an
enormous Spanish Gothic edifice
built in 1927. The room was
reconfigured to accommodate the
work.

Floors were sanded to remove the
basketball court's markings, and
the wall for the reliquary
paintings was constructed inside
the space.In 2010 the piece was
installed at the Art Gallery of
Ontario museum in Toronto,
where Kiefer created eight new
panels specifically for the AGO's
exhibition of this work.
In Next Year in Jerusalem (2010)
at Gagosian Gallery, Kiefer
explained that each of the works
was a reaction to a personal
"shock" initiated by something he
had recently heard of.
Personal life
Kiefer left his first wife and
children
in Germany on his move to Barjac
in 1992. From 2008 he lived in
Paris, in a large house in
the Marais district, with his
second wife, the Austrian
photographer
Renate Graf, and their two
children. In 2017, Kiefer was
ranked one of the richest 1,001
individuals and families in
Germany by the monthly business
publication Manager Magazin.
Collections
Kiefer's works are included in
numerous public collections,
including the Hamburger Bahnhof,
Berlin; the Museum of Modern Art
and the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York; Detroit
Institute of Arts, Detroit; the Tate
Modern, London; the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art; the Art
Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo;
the Philadelphia Museum of Art;
the National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra; the Tel Aviv Museum of
Art; and the Albertina, Vienna. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York owns 20 of the artist’s
rare watercolors. Notable private
collectors include Eli Broad and
Andrew J. Hall.
Recognition
In 1990, Kiefer was awarded the
Wolf Prize. In 1999 the Japan Art
Association awarded him the
Praemium Imperiale for his lifetime
achievements. In the explanatory
statement it reads:

"A complex critical engagement
with history runs through Anselm
Kiefer's work. His paintings as well
as the sculptures of Georg Baselitz
created an uproar at the 1980
Venice Biennale: the viewers had
to decide whether the apparent
Nazi motifs were meant ironically
or whether the works were meant
to convey actual fascist ideas.
Kiefer worked with the conviction
that art could heal a traumatized
nation and a vexed, divided world.
He created epic paintings on giant
canvases that called up the history
of German culture with the help
of depictions of figures such as
Richard Wagner or Goethe, thus
continuing the historical tradition
of painting as a medium of
addressing the world. Only a few
contemporary artists have such a
pronounced sense of art's duty to
engage the past and the ethical
questions of the present,
and are in the position to express
the possibility of the absolution of
guilt through human effort."
In 2008, Kiefer was awarded the
Peace Prize of the German Book
Trade, given for the first time to a
visual artist. Art historian Werner
Spies said in his speech that Kiefer
is a passionate reader who takes
impulses from literature for his
work. In 2011 Kiefer was appointed
to the chair of creativity in art at
the Collège de France.
1983 – Hans-Thoma-Preis (Baden-
Württemberg)
1990 – Wolf Prize in Arts
1990 – Goslarer Kaiserring
1997 – International Prize by the
Jury of the 47th Venice Biennale
1999 – Praemium Imperiale (Japan)
2005 – Merit Cross 1st Class of the
Order of Merit of the Federal
Republic of Germany
(Verdienstkreuz 1. Klasse)
2005 – Austrian Decoration for
Science and Art
2008 – Peace Prize of the German
Book Trade
2011 – Berliner Bär (B.Z.-
Kulturpreis)
2011 – Leo-Baeck-Medal, Leo Baeck
Institut of New York
2017 – J. Paul Getty Medal Award

Morteza Momayez
August 26, 1935 –
October 25, 2005
was an Iranian graphic designer.
He was one of the founders of
Iranian Graphic Design Society
(IGDS) and held a membership to
Alliance Graphique Internationale
(AGI). He was the president of
Tehran International Poster
Biennial and Editor-in-chief of
“Neshan”.Throughout his career,
Momayez initiated many cultural
institutes, exhibitions and graphic
design publications.
The renowned pioneer of graphic
design in Iran, Momayez received
the Art & Culture Award of
Excellency from the president of
Iran in 2004.
Fine Art at University of Tehran in
1965 and his diploma from Ecole
National Superier des Art Deco in
Paris, France in 1968.
Experiences: Graphic Design
Magazines: Iran Abad(1960), Ketab
va Keyhan Hafteh (1961-62),
Farhang (1961), Kavosh (1963-64),
Negin(1965), Farhang va Zendegi
(1969-78),Roudaki (1971-1978),
Cinema (1974-75), Memari va
Honareh Iran (1987), Kelk (1990-
),Neghahe No (1991-99), Sharif
(1993-2001),Tasvir (1992), Silk Road
(1994-95), Faslnameh
Khavarmyaneh ( 1994), Goftego
(1994-),Payam-e-Emrouz(1994-
2000). Art Director and Graphic
Design: Tehran International Film
Festival (1973-77)
Biography
Morteza Momayez was born on
August 26, 1935 in Tehran, Iran .His
father was Mohammad-Ali and his
mother was Kochak. He got his
bachelor in painting from school of
17

Awards
2004 National Award of Art
achievements from the
Academy of Art in Tehran.
PUBLICATIONS
Books : Drawing and Painting –
Graphic Art in Iran – Design and
Designing
Signs (Cultural and Trademarks of
M.Momayez). Plakat, Poster,
Morteza Momayez
Articles: Magazine lay-out Design –
Slogans and Titles –
Visual Design in the Persian
Alphabet – a Survey of Sign-
Illustration and Imagination-
A Short History of Poster in Iran
Prefaces: Catalogue of “50 Years
of Graphic Arts in Iran” exhibition-
Catalogue of “poster Art in Iran”
exhibition – Catalogue of “First
Asian Graphic Design Biennial –
Tehran” exhibition – Who is Who
in Graphic Art (Section of Iran)
EXHIBITIONS
Art Biennial Tehran-Poster Biennial
Warsaw-Poster –Exhibition Cannes
Poster Biennial Bruo-Poster
Biennial Lahti-Bergische Lowe, W.
Germany – Art Poster Gallery, Bad
Durkheim, W. Germany – Triennale
Toyama 1985/1988 Japan –
Colorado International Poster
Exhibition 1987 – Salon
International de L’Affiche, 1986/88
France – Galleries and Museums in
Tehran – Six one – man exhibitions
in Tehran .
Presented in NOVUM ,Germany-
MODERN PUBLICITY, England-
PROJECT.
Poland – GRAPHIS POSTER,
Switzerland – AMERICAN
CINEMATOGRAPHERS,USA-
ARTNEWS,USA– LETTERHEADS,USA
– GRAPHIC DESIGN, Japan – WHO IS
WHO IN GRAPHIC ART, Switzerland-
TOP GRAPHIC DESIGN, Switzerland-
LOGOTYPES OF THE WORLD 1970-
1983,Japan – POSTER BY MEMBERS
OF THE ALLIANCE GRAPHIC
INTERNATIONAL, 1960-1985,USA –
WORLD TRADEMARKS AND
LOGOTYPES I, Japan- IDEA, No. 212,
1989, Japan .

http://www.aziz-anzabi.com