Farhad Moshiri, certainly one of Iran’s most influential modern artists, died on July 16 at 61. The Third Line gallery, the Dubai gallery that represented him, confirmed his demise.
“Our journey with Moshiri started in 2006 with New Work by Farhad Moshiri at our first house within the UAE. Since then, we’ve cherished witnessing his ever-evolving follow,” the gallery wrote on Instagram. “Our ideas are together with his household. Farhad Moshiri can be deeply missed, remembered as each a buddy and artist. Could his soul relaxation in everlasting peace.”
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Moshir was famend for his marriage of Persian visible traditions and Pop artwork sensibilities. American consumerism and promoting, pop music and comics mingled with Persian embroidery and calligraphy. His work sparkled, actually: beads, glitter, and fake gems usually embellished his figuration, subverting delicate indictment with a valuable levity.
“He not solely established the primary wave of up to date artwork publish 1979, but additionally grew to become one of many uncommon artists who radically, and efficiently, introduced the entire nice craftsmanship, iconography and storytelling inherent in Persian tradition and historical past into his modern follow,” Sotheby’s director for Center Japanese and modern artwork Ashkan Baghestani informed the Nationwide. “The breadth, range and scope of his output on this sense was unparalleled.”
Moshiri was born in 1963 in Shiraz, Iran, to a household that owned cinemas. Talking to Artnet Information in 2017, he recounted a childhood watching American movies. The cinema was left amid the Iranian Revolution, when his household immigrated to Los Angeles, the place he earned a tremendous arts diploma from California Institute of the Arts in 1984. His explorations in set up, video, and portray coalesced round his nice influences: Pop artwork and conceptualism. (He was generally referred to as “the Center East’s Andy Warhol,” a cliched moniker that has been utilized in lots of variations to artists of the International South.)
He fused of excessive artwork and lowbrow tradition, mirroring the sensibility of his younger dwelling nation, which had an historic tradition. Neither his adopted dwelling nor place of birth had been past reproach; Iranian society, perpetually divided over its destiny, was a fruitful topic.
Moshiri was additionally a prolific collaborator, working for many years with a single group of Iranian craftswomen on tasks. SNOW FOREST 002A (2017), first proven at Perrotin in New York, recreates his {photograph} of a snowy forest utilizing black and white thread and beads. He first drew the picture on a canvases, then delivered them to the ladies, every of whom hand embroidered the drawing with beads, making a textured, shimmering composition. The ladies labored of their dwelling and, after six months, despatched the completed piece again.
Lichtensteinian figures or mundane objects featured usually in his follow, however he simply as often let phrases communicate for themselves. God (2012) is a patchwork of embroidered canvases during which the divine phrase repeats 42 instances, like a flashing neon commercial. The piece is comparatively innocuous in a secular context, but when transplanted to an Islamic venue in Iran, the place issues of worship are indivisible from energy, the piece would achieve a sardonic sheen.
However he pushed again in opposition to the concept he made visible gags. “There’s a tendency for the Iranian artwork neighborhood to consider that Artwork is not any joking matter. I completely agree with that,” he informed the Customary in 2014. “Artwork is critical enterprise. I can’t assist it in the event you discover one thing humorous in my work.”
Not that he didn’t have a humorousness—requested in the identical interview for his life motto, he replied: “Life is brief. So am I.”
Moshiri has proven extensively in Tehran, Europe and the United Arab Emirates with The Third Line and Perrotin. His first solo museum present in the US was in 2018 on the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.