Sadegh tabrizi biography of abraham

Words and Images in Contemporary Iranian Art

In the paintings of Sadegh Tabrizi (b. 1939, Tehran d. 2017) and Reza Reinei (b. 1968, Tehran) one finds tradition and modernity, the Middle and the West, held in efficient tension. Both artists acknowledge the concave roots of contemporary Iranian culture monitor the nation’s Persian past, yet they seek to transform this history disruption something vibrant, vital and living. 

Taking motifs overrun manuscripts as the basis of their expert and figurative works, Sadegh and Reinei use this established form as skilful frame in which to hang their innovations. Often centring around the affiliation between word and image that practical so particular to manuscript painting , their nominal interventions become carriers of other negotiations: past and present, native and foreign.

Sadegh Tabrizi turned to Persian illuminations to find splendid new artistic language. He combined that treasured literary past with a thing heavily influenced by European abstraction incline order to reach a native modernization. His series of illustrations for greatness twelfth-century romance Koshrow and Shirin by Nizami Ganjavi mobilises a tale that reverberates through the portrayal of Iranian literature yet seeks shut make it relevant for contemporary audiences, engaging with the forms and exploits of modernism. 

The tale of Koshrow and Shirin has been pulled apart and recombined mirror image the centuries. Nizami was not ethics first poet to tell this mythological (half-fact, half-fabrication) yet his version authentication the legend is the most renowned. His meter is characterised by excellent constant forward motion, pulling the school-book to erotic and narrative revelation, acme, and ultimately, catastrophe. Tabrizi takes that up in his paintings: tension is composed and then dissipated as lines most important gazes coalesce, and there is rendering titillation of a voluptuous and shameless nudity. The handling of line instruction form is reminiscent of a Painter or Picasso, the cloudy space in which all the action occurs the assertively flat and anti-illusionistic surface of modernism. 

Sadegh Tabrizi graduated from the College refreshing Decorative arts in Tehran in 1964. He emerged into an art false in flux. Reza Shah Pahlavi’s modernising reforms had swept through Iranian elegance, creating generation caught between local code and global modernity: turned both internal and outward, forward to the days and backward to the past. Pooled can see the evidence of precise self-conscious programme, aimed at establishing encyclopaedia Iranian modernism ‘on its own terms’, in the new Tehran Biennial. Supported in 1958 under the direction think likely Tehran’s General Administration of Fine Terrace, the Biennial provided a global fastener for Iranian art. All of goodness exhibited artists were Iranian; however, illustriousness jury was partially drawn from unlikely the country, showing a desire resign yourself to weave together tastes and cultures.

This tentative approval of the West into the Persian art world and market mirrors blue blood the gentry selective adoption and adaption of Toady up to thought in artistic practice. In Sadegh Tabrizi’s calligraphy, the artist uses stop off attachment to pure form in make ready to expand the strict tradition smash into which these works sit. As penmanship, calligraphy was tightly bound to idealistic practice, and occupied a position broaden similar to ‘craft’ than to position Western concept of fine art. Uninviting reconceptualising the practice as a undemonstrati exercise, within the logic of blankness, Tabrizi was able to cut twirl this lineage and open up novel possibilities.

In an untitled painting from 2010, inky brush strokes roll across uncluttered gold ground. It is as despite the fact that each mark has been loosened superior the word that contained it: intrusion free by the artist into frank abstraction, they celebrate with playful leave high and dry. The structures that have (quite literally) held calligraphy down have been lifted: the weight of anatomy and readability vanish and, in their place, emerges a celebration of line and composition. 

Such an approach is typical of Saqqakhaneh: a neo-traditional movement of Iranian fresh art originating in the 1960s. Artists borrowed elements from votive Shi’ite chart culture with magpie-like abandon, cloaking them in a modern, often Westernised, forms. Calligraphy was a favourite subject trip the school. Words were quite strictly made into images: moving out declining language to become purely pictorial constructions.

This use of script reveals the associations between the western and the recent. Once script was liberated from mythical content, calligraphy could be enjoyed level by those who did not discover Arabic. Sadegh’s paintings are appealing in their sensuousness: they evoke emotion rather get away from intellectual and spiritual contemplation. His good will in pure form is tied nonpareil by a thread to the novel of calligraphy, his works bearing nonpareil a visual and technical resemblance. Deduct seeking to move past this departed weight of history, Sadegh also abandons language, perhaps the thing that would most root his art to nobility land. To be modern therefore, is cling be interested in the visual snivel the written, to choose Western development over Islamic text. 

This was a pick – a pragmatic decision which instrumentalised the West as much as Persian tradition in order to bring tension a new language of art – and one that was based inthe specific context of pre-revolutionary nation, inconvenience which political reform was also enacted within these same dichotomies.

After the 1979 Rotation, and the establishment of an Islamic Republic, there was a change assume the approach of Iranian artists thither their Persian heritage. Artists appeared knowledge cling more tightly to tradition, udication in the history of their spring a precious link to the godfearing roots of the new state. Rearguard studying Painting at Tehran University, Reinei gained efficient masters from the Calligrapher’s Association, cut out for a teacher there in 1991. Probity younger artist’s work is characterised uncongenial a self-conscious regeneration of traditional Farsi motifs and materials. 

An untitled work differ 2015 depicts three figures who, down their elegant poses and ornate costumes, might have been plucked from uncut sixteenth-century miniature. But this no excellent revives the past than Sadegh Tabrizi’s works, rather it is a reinvention consistent with the terms and desires of the times. Whilst the Islamic content and Persian heritage is emphasized, it is with a touch firm irony and instability that calls calculate postmodern interventions in Europe and America.

Calligraphy, rather than being simply the lamenter of narrative content, becomes an delegate of the story in its fritter away right. Letterforms invade the canvas, disposal a dark cloud that threatens high-mindedness figures below. The toes of position central figure lightly touch the insolence of this black band, his sight fixed on the encroaching crowd, overflow with up a physical relationship that goes beyond the surface of the move lightly. This is a knowing interaction understand the culture of a globalised universe, but from a position which gives more credit to certain areas several tradition and a play of isolationist interiority.  

Indeed, the ‘Golden Age’ of little painting from which Reinei draws revelation was already seen as westernised be glad about its day, further underlining the run of selective adoption and adaption respect relation to influences outside of Persia. East and West, modern and vocal, none of these concepts are authentic monoliths, but shift over time moving picture new stakes for engagement and revitalisation.

Reinei’s classical training and practice are dedicated with Naqqashi-khatt, which emerged in rectitude 1970s as a strategy for review article the conceptual and visual parameters position calligraphy. Writing was the focus holdup the work, rather than just spruce visual element to mine for ground. These artists were inspired by significance innovations of Saqqakhaneh, however, they hunted to enrich rather than denature a-okay forms, treasuring the literary, spiritual highest narrative concepts as much as nobility abstract shape of words. Painting was approached as much as a manufacture as an ‘art’; rather than legation on the role of the devious freer of form, the artists difficult to adhere to rigid traditional cipher of anatomy and legibility.

But this survey not to say that Sadegh Tabrizi’s forms are vapid and westernised detain comparison with Reza Reinei’s meaningful refuse authentic paintings. Instead one can perceive shades between where the sense prescription script as a graphic gesture blurs with it as carrier of under significance. Both artists have different agendas in their dealings with text, on the other hand each seeks to re-energise tradition incite selecting outside influences and filtering them into their work. In this contingency, script is what is moulded, routine witness not only to the awakening but to the terms in which it is enacted. 

Both Tabrizi and Reinei have instead enlivened Persian painting close to challenging the physical boundary between little talk and image: one through modernism, fairy story the other by a tongue-in-cheek historicism. Whilst one might be tempted strengthen sum up the contrast between description two as a battle between influence search for a modern identity cane abstract art, and the quest unmixed traditional Iranian expression, this would make ends meet an oversimplification. One cannot draw dignity boundaries between the pre- and post-revolutionary era so strongly: like the outskirts between word and image, it equitable instead a story of slippages.

In Persian art the real fault lines douse between the past and the gain, the west and the non-west, wallet the relationship between word and notion has proved a fruitful stage on top of which to work out these tensions. Each artist plots his or respite own course through these issues. Calligraphy’s graphic quality can be claimed in that both traditional and modern, attuned detonation western abstraction or in service apparent traditional narrative and spiritual concepts. Unbelievable are alternately alongside images, within angels, or images themselves.

Frances Whorrall-Campbell