Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from a private collection, London
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner, circa early 1970's

Literature:
For similar works from the Tree Series, see: Germano Celant and Faryar Javaherian, Towards the Ineffable: Farideh Lashai at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, TMOCA Press, 2016, p.81, 89

""""I became inflicted with the magic of orange trees and never overcame it. The trees took hold of me and never let me go, with thousands of hands, thousands of embraces"""" - Farideh Lashai

Graceful, sophisticated and exhibiting a deep reverence for its subject matter, the present painting is perhaps the rarest and most significant work by Farideh Lashai ever to surface at auction.

Painted in the early 1970's when Lashai had just returned to Iran after her studies in Austria, the work sees Lashai at her most naturalistic. Influenced by her contact with the new emergent artistic avant-garde of Iran, including figures like Sohrab Sepehri, Lashai's works from the Tree Series, of which this is the first to appear auction, are a rare glimpse of a painter at the bloom of her artistic maturity.

Farideh Lashai is remembered as one of the most talented and successful artists to have emerged from within Iran in recent decades. Meticulous, erudite and supremely perceptive, her work is characterized by a mastery of the painterly aesthetic, using the visual vocabulary of abstract and lyrical expressionism in depiction of ethereal natural landscapes, allegorical compositions, and colour fields.

Above all, Lashai's enduring talent lied in her conceptual and aesthetic originality, and her ability to draw from established artistic traditions without being confined by their precepts. As an artist with abstraction as her genesis, she is nevertheless unafraid of the concrete, as a craftswoman fluent in the language of the brush, she felt comfortable experimenting with video art, installation and new media, it is this unrestricted, intrepid sense of creativity which is so palatable in much of her work.

Lashai has stated that "when you have doubt and uncertainty, you open the way for the expansion and development of an idea" and her forthright rejection of the objectivity of perception is manifest in much of her body of work, this sense of expressive subjectivity is gloriously exemplified in the present work, which counts as one of her most deftly executed, and technically accomplished paintings. Here, clearly defined, monolithic tree trunks provide a stark contrast to gestural, spontaneous surrounding fauna, punctuated by a vigorous flourish of cobalt that articulating the briskly defined flowers.

Like the Expressionists and Emotivist painters that came before her, Lashai's compositions remind us the subjectivity of perception, rejecting a strictly ocular, representational approach to depicting nature and her visual surroundings, Lashai recognizes the transformative effect of perception on a given subject.

For Lashai, reality, ultimately, is a fickle concept when its observation is not only channeled through but entirely dependent on our sensual faculties, senses which can embellish, obfuscate, enliven or depress their surroundings. The talent of the poet, artist, or musician lies in this very gap between reality and perception, in being able to give some form of physical or tangible representation to the way our thoughts and feelings colour the world we inhabit.

It is this, which leads us to Gorky's proclamation that "Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes. It is the emancipation of the mind", and it is precisely, this unseen aspect of our surroundings which Lashai so poetically captures.

Technically, her fluency, awareness of textural and tonal aspects of paint, and effuse lyrical gestures demonstrate her expressionist approach to the subject matter of nature in striking form.

Ultimately, In Lashai's oeuvre, and in the present work in particular, we encounter a vision of the natural world that is far from stale, academic and static, but one which is magnified by our poetic, metaphysical, and emotional responses to its grandeur.