Farhad Moshiri

Acquired directly from the artist in 2002

This work is in very good condition. Some craquelure across the surface of the canvas, inherent and in line with the artist's choice of medium and creative process. Colours: The colours in the catalogue raisonee are accurate, with the overall hues being slightly softer.
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Before the love and the glitter, Farhad Moshiri’s artistic persona was shaped by the contours of Sassanian clay. An early piece from his series of pottery paintings, Sotheby’s is incredibly excited to offer one of the first works to have ever been exhibited by the artist. A bowl stunning in its rendition and overpowering in the simplicity of its form; its execution is marked with immense technical talent. Its inception lends poetic reflections of a personal biography, but its significance remains outside of itself – not in what it may or may not carry.

Moshiri’s urns and bowls do however hold the mimetic desires of discovery, or more appropriately – rediscovery. He returned to Iran in 1991 after having attended California Institute of the Arts. The inspiration for his series of pottery paintings came when Moshiri traded in the perceived footpath of the ‘American Dream’ for days spent amidst the calls of street vendors in Tehran’s Antique District. Moshiri began collecting old ceramic vessels and revered their elegant form and utilitarian function. Stylistically, his canvases borrowed from techniques used by the antique dealers who deliberately aged their 19th century Qajar paintings.

Crushed, folded, soaked and cracked, his canvas is weathered, earthy and heavy handed in its treatment; yet the inherent fragility of its subject matter offsets it with a grace that can only come with the knowledge of its dormant, ancient history. It is its scale and intentionally distressed surface that pulls us under the rubble; past the initial layers of dust and debris and into a sensory unearthing. It is precisely this ability to take the sensory elements of an excavation and transform them into its visual embodiment that makes his work so impressive.

While inspired by heritage, this work reflects an aesthetic recollection, a reminder of buried pasts and forgotten memories, irrespective of culture. As if embedded into the craquelure and darkened browns, the work is lined with the longing for discovery and reclamation. It is his approach to creation that is most fascinating and why it comes as no surprise that he was exhibited so frequently in Iran’s first ever experimental space on 13 Vanak Street Gallery in Tehran.

With an oeuvre that moves freely between spaces steeped in shared cultural memories and those that playfully reflect a ubiquitous zeitgeist, Moshiri shows us that culture is personal and porous, but ultimately illusory.  He reminds us that beauty and a sense of identity comes from the pleasure of rediscovery and the realignment or reattribution of meaning. This important and beautiful work personifies the pure elegance, both in thought and technique, of the early stages of a career that has gone on to see global acclaim.