“Mirrors are a reflection of anything and everything. You become part of that mirror. It is communication—the mirror and yourself, the piece of art and yourself.”
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian was born in 1922 in Qazvin, Iran, where her encounters of daily life were steeped with artistic inspiration; her childhood home was decorated with images of nightingales and flowers and the windows adorned with stained glass, and the city beyond marked by its traditional Islamic architecture. Farmanfarmaian attended the University of Tehran’s Fine Arts College and intended to further her studies in Paris, when her plans were hindered by the onset of World War II. Instead, Farmanfarmaian travelled to New York, where she would befriend the likes of Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, and Louise Nevelson, and become adopted into the city’s vibrant avant-garde art scene; she claimed, “going to America started something” (Hans Ulrich Obrist, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Works on Paper, London and New York 2015, p. 7). Farmanfarmaian studied at Cornell University, Parsons School of Design, and the Art Students League of New York, and took up fashion illustration at Bonwit Teller, where she met the young Warhol. After fourteen years, she returned to Iran in 1957 and spent the following decade travelling her homeland to visit its old cities, architectural ruins, and mosques. Between her experiences in the New York modern art scene and those of her native Iran, Farmanfarmaian’s oeuvre began to take a distinct shape, perched between Western abstraction and traditional Persian craft. This was catalysed by a visit to the Shah Cheragh, a twelfth-century Shirazi shrine whose interior is tessellated in a mosaic of tiny mirrored squares, triangles, and hexagons.
“The very space seemed on fire, the lamps blazing in hundreds of thousands of reflections…It was a universe unto itself, architecture transformed into performance, all movement and fluid light, all solids fractured and dissolved in brilliance in space, in prayer. I was overwhelmed.”
These visits marked a watershed moment in Farmanfarmaian’s practise, upon which she embarked on an exploration of mirror work, or ayneh kari, a Persian technique dating back to the sixteenth century when glass was imported from Europe and would often arrive broken. She claimed, “I saw the shrines again that were made of mirrors - their ceilings and walls. I wanted to bring the tradition, the mystic geometries, back into people’s homes in a new way” (Obrist, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, 2015, p. 45) Despite her fervent study of the practice, Farmanfarmaian realised she would not be able to emulate the longstanding work of traditional craftsmen, who had been apprenticed since childhood. She began to work with master craftsman Hajji Ostad Mohammad Navid, who was well versed in the synthesis of cut mirrors, matt plaster, and painted glass, and assisted her in materialising her dense conceptual content and dazzling geometric aesthetic. Though Farmanfarmaian’s process was one of spontaneity, the mathematics of Islamic geometry was integral, and she would return to the endless possibilities of shapes such as the hexagon, as in the present work:
“I would begin by drawing my basic model on paper - a hexagon, for example. I would put it on a light box and cover it with a new sheet of paper. Then I would choose certain parts of the original hexagon to retrace, going from one corner to another, but always remaining with the original hexagon.”
Frank Stella remarked of her works, “The real expression of Islamic geometry is its use as architectural surface. But Monir has taken it off the wall and made it into essentially its own surface” (Stella quoted in ibid., p. 83.). Sufi symbolism is also present in her use of geometry: the triangle represents human consciousness; the square the four cardinal directions; the pentagon the five senses; the hexagon the body; and the circle the universe. At once modern and traditional, Farmanfarmaian’s works defy easy categorisation, their beauty lying not in a juxtaposition of her two worlds, but in her ability to marry them unstirred by cultural differences. She emerged triumphantly at the forefront of the international modern art scene with a practice rooted in the historic mores of her homeland.
With a distinguished career spanning over five decades, Farmanfarmaian’s works have been acquired by several major public institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Tate Modern, London; and the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Jameel Collection, London. She has enjoyed extensive international solo exhibitions, and participated in four editions of the Venice Biennale, in which she was awarded the Gold Medal thrice. In 2017, the Monir Museum was opened in Tehran in her honour.