Nima Sagharchi
Group Head
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Lot 46*,TP
Farhad Moshiri(Iran, born 1963)842L1
Amended
26 April 2017, 15:00 BST
London, New Bond StreetSold for £85,000 inc. premium
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Noor Soussi
Head of Department
Farhad Moshiri (Iran, born 1963)
842L1
oil on canvas
signed "Farhad Moshiri", titled "842L1" and dated "2006" in Farsi on the verso, executed in 2006
185 x 174cm (72 13/16 x 68 1/2in).
oil on canvas
signed "Farhad Moshiri", titled "842L1" and dated "2006" in Farsi on the verso, executed in 2006
185 x 174cm (72 13/16 x 68 1/2in).
Footnotes
Provenance:
Property from a private collection, Dubai
"In Paris, at the Louvre, I find myself standing face to face with the Mona Lisa. On closer inspection, to my fascination, I see thousands of tiny cracks on its surface. I was mesmerized, big time. What I found utterly beautiful would otherwise be considered a nightmare for the museum restorers and a tragedy for the art world"
Farhad Moshiri
The present lot is a large and spectacular example of Farhad Moshiri's inimitable calligraphic series. Executed in 2006, it exhibits all the aesthetic and conceptual hallmarks that make this series one of the most coveted and distinguished within his body of work.
Having completed his studies at the distinguished California Institute of Arts, Moshiri returned to his native Iran with a distinctly occidental artistic sensibility, experimenting with sound art, assemblages and new media. Moshiri sees his initial time in Iran as a developmental stage within his artistic progression, when his raw and capricious aesthetic temperaments were yet to be cogently anchored in any identifiable conceptual or visual agenda.
Supremely talented but largely unhoned, Moshiri was commissioned to paint decorative frescoes that would later influence the meticulous craft-centred approach of his subsequent work. It is at this point when Moshiri developed an interest in ancient Iranian pottery and the calligraphic imagery associated with much of the craft based artistic production of the Medieval Islamic world.
It is through his fascination with these cultural relics and their harsh juxtaposition with a contemporary society that appeared to be expunging the aesthetic excellence and spiritual vigour of the past in favour of a mass, consumable form of culture that led Moshiri to concoct his signature blend of traditional and kitsch imagery.
The present work is a superlative manifestation of the artist's work on this subject matter. In this painting, the outward beauty and elegance of the composition mask the symbolic significance of the characters depicted. In the medieval era, numeral calligraphy served an important spiritual function in traditional Sufi practice. Numerological characters formed both mystical talismans and secret languages which Sufi dervishes used as forms of coded communication.
A belief in the divinity of number, as expounded by mystic philosophers and scientists like Al-Farabi and Ghazali, coupled with the notion that mathematics was an artefact of heavenly order, led to complicated numerological charts, treatises, and codes being used both as tools of spiritual understanding and as objects of talisman worship.
Moshiri's homage to the archaic ritual of mystical numerology, however, is related through a distinctly contemporary artistic agenda. The numeral forms themselves no longer serve their traditional purpose, and are therefore reduced to visual remnants of a redundant practice. By eroding the fabric of his canvases with a pronounced craqualure, Moshiri reminds us that practices that once served as a cultural backbone of Iranian society are now fragments of history, worthy of aesthetic recollection but not of functional application.
Ultimately, Moshiri's composition serves as the residual vestige of an expired age, reminding us that the constituent elements of our current artistic landscape often make use of profound traditions whose outward aesthetic we openly admire, but whose true meaning we often neglect.
Saleroom notices
Please note that this lot is a TP lot but is unmarked in the catalogue.