3. Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian
born 1924 is an Iranian artist who
lives in Tehran, and a collector of
traditional folk art.She has been
noted as one of the most
prominent Iranian artists of the
contemporary period,and she is the
first modern artist to achieve an
artistic practice that weds the
geometric patterns and cut-glass
mosaic techniques of her Iranian
heritage with the rhythms of
modern Western geometric
abstraction.
Education
Born to educated parents in the
religious town of Qazvin in north-
western Iran, Farmanfarmaian
acquired artistic skills early in
childhood, receiving drawing
lessons from a tutor and studying
postcard depictions of western
art.After studying at the University
of Tehran at the Faculty of Fine Art
in 1944, she then moved to New
York via steamer boat, when World
War II derailed plans to study art in
Paris, France. In New York, she
studied at Cornell University, at
Parsons The New School for Design,
where she majored in fashion
illustration, and at the Art Students
League. As a fashion illustrator, she
held various freelance jobs,
working with magazines such as
Glamour before being hired by the
Bonwit Teller department store,
where she made the acquaintance
of a young Andy Warhol.
Additionally, she learned more
about art through her trips to
museums and through her
exposure to the Eighth Street Club
and New York's avant-garde art
scene, becoming friends with
artists and contemporaries Louise
Nevelson, Jackson Pollock, Willem
de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and
Joan Mitchell. 1
4.
5. In early 1957, Farmanfarmaian
moved back to Iran.
Inspired by the residing culture,
she discovered “a fascination with
tribal and folk artistic tradition” of
her country’s history, which “led
her to rethink the past and
conceive a new path for her art.”
In the following years, she would
further develop her Persian
inspiration by crafting mirror
mosaics and abstract monotypes,
featuring her work at the Iran
Pavilion in the 1958
Venice Biennale,and holding a
number of exhibitions in places
such as Tehran University (1963),
the Iran-America Society (1973),
and the Jacques Kaplan/Mario
Ravagnan Gallery (1974).
Exile and second return to Iran
In 1979 Farmanfarmaian and her
second husband, Abolbashar,
traveled to New York to visit
family.Around the same time, the
Islamic Revolution began, and so
the Farmanfarmaians found
themselves exiled from Iran, an
exile that would last for over
twenty years.Farmanfarmaian
attempted to reconcile her mirror
mosaics with the limited resources
offered in America, but such lacking
materials and comparatively
inexperienced workers restricted
her work. In the meantime, she
placed larger emphasis on her
other aspects of art, such as
commissions, textile designs, and
drawing.
Since moving back to Iran in 1992,
and later Tehran in 2004,
Farmanfarmaian has reaffirmed her
place among Iran’s art community,
gathering both former and new
employees to help create her
mosaics.Today, she continues to live
and work in Tehran
Artwork
Aside from her mirror work,
Farmanfarmaian is additionally
known for her paintings, drawings,
textile designs, and monotypes
Mirror Mosaics
Around the 1970s, Farmanfarmaian
visited the Shah Cheragh mosque in
Shiraz, Iran.With the shrine’s “high-
domed hall… covered in tiny
square, triangular, and hexagonal
mirrors,”
6.
7. similar to many other ancient
Iranian mosques,this event acted
as a turning point in
Farmanfarmaian’s artistic journey,
leading to her interest in mirror
mosaic artwork. According to her
memoir, Farmanfarmaian has
described the experience as
transformative:
“The very space seemed on fire,
the lamps blazing in hundreds of
thousands of reflection... 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.
Aided by Iranian craftsman, Hajji
Ostad Mohammad Navid, she
created a number of mosaics and
exhibition pieces by cutting
mirrors and glass paintings into a
multitude of shapes, which she
would later reform into
constructions that evoked aspects
of Sufism and Islamic culture.
“Ayeneh Kari” is the traditional art
of cutting mirrors into small pieces
and slivers, placing them in
decorative shapes over plaster. This
form of Iranian reverse glass and
mirror mosaics is a craft
traditionally passed on from father
to son. Farmanfarmaian, however,
was the first contemporary artist to
reinvent the traditional medium in
a contemporary way.By striving to
mix Iranian influences and the
tradition of mirror artwork with
artistic practices outside of strictly
Iranian culture, “offering a new way
of looking at ancient aesthetic
elements of this land using tools
that are not limited to a particular
geography,” Farmanfarmaian is able
to express a cyclical conception of
spirituality, space, and balance in
her mosaics.
Personal life
Farmanfarmaian married Iranian
artist Manoucher Yektai in 1950.
They divorced in 1953, and in 1957,
she returned to Tehran to marry
lawyer Abolbashar
Farmanfarmaian.In 1991,
Abolbashar died of leukemia. She
has two daughters, Nima and
Zahra.While living in Iran,
Farmanfarmaian was also an avid
collector.
8. She sought out paintings behind
glass, traditional tribal jewelry and
potteries, and amassed one of the
greatest collections of "coffee-
house paintings" in the country—
commissioned paintings by folk
artists as coffee-house,
story-telling murals. The vast
majority of her works and her
collections of folk art were
confiscated, sold or destroyed.
Commissioned installations
Major commissioned installations
include work for the Queensland
Art Gallery (2009), the Victoria &
Albert Museum's Jameel Collection
(2006), the Dag Hammerskjod
building, New York (1981) and the
Niyavaran Cultural Center (1977–
78), as well as acquisitions by the
Metropolitan Museum of Art,[18]
The Tehran Museum of
Contemporary Art, and the
Museum of Contemporary Art
Tokyo.
In popular culture
Farmanfarmaian was named as one
of the BBC's "100 Women" of 2015.
Bibliography
Farmanfarmaian's memoir is titled
A Mirror Garden: A Memoir was co-
authored by Zara Houshmand
(Knopf, 2007). Her work is
documented in the book, Monir
Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian:
Cosmic Geometry (Damiani Editore
& The Third Line, 2011), which
features in-depth interview by Hans
Ulrich Obrist, and critical essays by
Nader Ardalan, Media Farzin and
Eleanor Sims, tributes by
Farmanfarmaian's friends Etel
Adnan, Siah Armajani, caraballo-
farman, Golnaz Fathi, Hadi Hazavei,
Susan Hefuna, Aziz Isham, Rose
Issa, Faryar Javaherian, Abbas
Kiarostami, Shirin Neshat, Donna
Stein and Frank Stella. She is
referenced in an excerpt from The
Sense of Unity: The Sufi Tradition in
Persian Architecture by Nader
Ardalan and Laleh Bakhtiar (1973),
and an annotated timeline of
Farmanfarmaian's life by Negar
Azimi
11. Mohammed Kazem (born 1969) is
a contemporary Emirati artist
working in Dubai, United Arab
Emirates. He works primarily with
video, sound art, photography,
found objects and performance
art.
Kazem was a conceptual Emirati
artist whose work was recognized
as a group in a 2015 exhibit at the
Salwa Zeidan Gallery.The other
artists in the gallery's group were
Hassan Sharif, Hussain Sharif
(brother of Hassan Sharif),
Abdullah Al Saadi and
Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim.
Mohammed Kazem is a leading
conceptual artist in the UAE
contemporary art scene and is
known for his incorporation of
new media and his sophisticated
formalist language. His interest in
conceptual art and progressive
attitude towards form and context
is especially highlighted by his
ongoing series “Directions.”
Kazem first studied Fine Arts
at the Emirates Fine Art Society
and subsequently studied music
at the Al Rayat Music Institute of
Dubai and painting at the
Edinburgh College of Art. He was a
Painting Instructor at the Dubai Art
Atelier for ten years. Widely known
through numerous solo and group
exhibitions in the UAE and abroad,
Kazem’s participation includes the
Havana Biennial (2000), Singapore
Biennale (2006), Dhaka Biennial–
Bangladesh (2002), and the Sharjah
Biennale (1993–2007). Most
recently he exhibited at the
University of the Arts, Philadelphia
(2010); and at the Mori Art
Museum, Tokyo (2012). His works
have been collected by private
collectors and institutions such as
Deutsche Bank as well as museums
in Doha, Sharjah, JP Morgan Chase
Bank (USA), and Sittard (Holland).
“By engaging the work of Kazem,
we can witness the urban
modernity of an emerging nation
through the eyes of its individual
artists. In pursuing this initiative we
hope to demonstrate that the
developments we see in the region
today do not come from a void, but
rather evolve from the
contemporary thought and practice
of artists and intellectuals like
Kazem,
12.
13. whose work has consistently
interrogated the relationship
between the individual and
his/her social, urban, and natural
environments. In this sense, it
manifests as a living artistic
synthesis of a critical debate over
the modernity and the global
reality of the citizen and nation-
state,” elaborated Fadda.
Reem Fadda is currently
working as Associate Curator of
Middle Eastern Art–Guggenheim
Abu Dhabi Project at the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Foundation. She is
also a PhD candidate at the History
of Art and Visual Studies
Department at Cornell University.
Previously, Fadda was Director of
the Palestinian Association for
Contemporary Art (PACA) and
worked as Academic Director
at the International Academy
of Art – Palestine, which she
helped found in 2006. She curated
many projects such as Liminal
Spaces featured at PACA, Digital Art
lab Holon and Galerie Leipzig;
Ramallah Syndrome with
Decolonizing Architecture at the
53rd Venice Biennale,
Tarjama/Translation at the Queens
Museum & Herbert E. Johnson
Museum in New York and the 3rd
RIWAQ Biennale, which she co-
curated with Charles Esche in
Ramallah.
The National Pavilion of the United
Arab Emirates is initiated and
supported by His Excellency Abdul
Rahman bin Mohammed Al Owais,
UAE Minister of Culture, Youth and
Community Development. The
National Pavilion of the UAE
continues to be developed and
presented under the leadership of
its Commissioner, Dr. Lamees
Hamdan, a leader in the art and
culture scene in the UAE and
member of the Board of Directors
of the Dubai Culture and Arts
Authority.
15. David Hockney, (born 9 July 1937)
is an English painter, draughtsman,
printmaker, stage designer and
photographer. An important
contributor to the pop art
movement of the 1960s, he is
considered one of the most
influential British artists of
the 20th century.
Hockney has a home and studio in
Kensington, London and two
residences in California, where he
has lived on and off for over 30
years: one in Nichols Canyon, Los
Angeles, and an office and
archives on Santa Monica
Boulevard in
West Hollywood. For many years
he also kept a home in Bridlington,
East Riding of Yorkshire, until this
was sold in 2015.
Personal life
Hockney was born in Bradford,
England, to Laura and Kenneth
Hockney (a conscientious objector
in the Second World War), the
fourth of five children.He was
educated at Wellington Primary
School, Bradford Grammar School,
Bradford College of Art (where his
teachers included Frank Lisle and
his fellow students included
Norman Stevens, David Oxtoby and
John Loker)[citation needed] and
the Royal College of Art in London,
where he met R. B. Kitaj. While
there, Hockney said he felt at home
and took pride in his work. At the
Royal College of Art, Hockney
featured in the exhibition Young
Contemporaries—alongside Peter
Blake—that announced the arrival
of British Pop art. He was
associated with the movement, but
his early works display expressionist
elements, similar to some works by
Francis Bacon. When the RCA said it
would not let him graduate in 1962,
Hockney drew the sketch The
Diploma in protest. He had refused
to write an essay required for the
final examination, saying he should
be assessed solely on his artworks.
Recognising his talent and growing
reputation, the RCA changed its
regulations and awarded the
diploma.
A visit to California, where he
subsequently lived for many years,
inspired him to make a series of
paintings of swimming pools in the
comparatively new acrylic medium
rendered in a highly realistic style
using vibrant colours.
16. The artist moved to Los Angeles in
1964, returned to London in 1968,
and from 1973 to 1975 lived in
Paris. In 1974 he began a decade-
long personal relationship with
Gregory Evans who moved with
him to the US in 1976 and as of
2017 remains a business partner.
In 1978 he rented the canyon
house in which he lived when he
moved to Los Angeles, and later
bought and expanded it to include
his studio.He also owned a 1,643-
square-foot beach house at 21039
Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu,
which he sold in 1999 for around
$1.5 million.
Hockney is openlygay,and unlike
Andy Warhol, whom he
befriended, he openly explored
the nature of gay love in his
portraiture. Sometimes, as in We
Two Boys Together Clinging (1961),
named after a poem by Walt
Whitman, the works refer to his
love for men. Already in 1963, he
painted two men together in the
painting Domestic Scene, Los
Angeles, one showering while the
other washes his back.In summer
1966, while teaching at UCLA he
met Peter Schlesinger, an art
student who posed for paintings
and drawings, and with whom he
was romantically involved.
On the morning of 18 March 2013,
Hockney's 23-year-old assistant,
Dominic Elliott, died as a result of
drinking drain cleaner at Hockney's
Bridlington studio; he had also
earlier drunk alcohol and taken
cocaine, ecstasy and temazepam.
Elliott was a first- and second-team
player for Bridlington rugby club. It
was reported that Hockney's
partner drove Elliott to
Scarborough General Hospital
where he later died. The inquest
returned a verdict of death by
misadventure and Hockney was
never implicated.
In November 2015 Hockney sold his
house in Bridlington, a five-
bedroomed former guesthouse, for
£625,000, cutting all his remaining
ties with the town.
17.
18. He retains a studio in London
and a house in Malibu, California.
Hockney has smoked cigarettes
for over 60 years but has been
teetotal since 1990 when he had a
heart-attack. He holds a California
Medical Marijuana Verification
Card, which enables him to buy
cannabis for medical purposes. He
has used hearing aids since 1979,
but realised he was going
deaf long before that. He swims
for half an hour each day and can
stand for six hours at the easel.
Work
Hockney made prints, portraits of
friends, and stage designs for the
Royal Court Theatre,
Glyndebourne, La Scala and the
Metropolitan Opera in New York
City.
Born with synaesthesia, he sees
synesthetic colours in response to
musical stimuli.This does not show
up in his painting
or photography artwork, but is a
common underlying principle in
his designs for stage sets for ballet
and opera—where he bases
background colours and lighting on
the colours he sees while listening
to the piece's music.
Portraits
Hockney painted portraits at
different periods in his career. From
1968, and for the next few years he
painted friends, lovers, and
relatives just under lifesize and in
pictures that depicted good
likenesses of his subjects.
Hockney's own presence is often
implied, since the lines of
perspective converge to suggest the
artist's point of view.Hockney has
repeatedly returned to the same
subjects – his parents, artist Mo
McDermott (Mo McDermott,
1976), various writers he has
known, fashion designers Celia
Birtwell and Ossie Clark (Mr and
Mrs Clark and Percy, 1970–71),
curator Henry Geldzahler, art dealer
Nicholas Wilder, George Lawson
and his ballet dancer lover, Wayne
Sleep.
19. On arrival in California, Hockney
changed from oil to acrylic paint,
applying it as smooth flat and
brilliant colour. In 1965, the print
workshop Gemini G.E.L.
approached him to create a series
of lithographs with a Los Angeles
theme. Hockney responded by
creating a ready-made art
collection.
The "joiners"
In the early 1980s, Hockney began
to produce photo collages, which
he called "joiners", first using
Polaroid prints and subsequently
35mm, commercially processed
colour prints. Using Polaroid snaps
or photolab-prints of a single
subject, Hockney arranged a
patchwork to make a composite
image. An early photomontage
was of his mother. Because the
photographs are taken from
different perspectives and at
slightly different times, the result
is work that has an affinity with
Cubism, one of Hockney's major
aims—discussing the way human
vision works. Some pieces are
landscapes, such as Pearblossom
Highway others portraits, such as
Kasmin 1982, and My Mother,
Bolton Abbey, 1982.
Creation of the "joiners" occurred
accidentally. He noticed in the late
sixties that photographers were
using cameras with wide-angle
lenses. He did not like these
photographs because they looked
somewhat distorted. While working
on a painting of a living room and
terrace in Los Angeles, he took
Polaroid shots of the living room
and glued them together, not
intending for them to be a
composition on their own. On
looking at the final composition, he
realised it created a narrative, as if
the viewer moved through the
room. He began to work more with
photography after this discovery
and stopped painting for a while to
exclusively pursue this new
technique. Frustrated with the
limitations of photography and its
'one eyed' approach, however, he
returned to painting.
Later work
In 1976, at Atelier Crommelynck,
Hockney created a portfolio of 20
etchings, The Blue Guitar: Etchings
By David Hockney Who Was
Inspired By Wallace Stevens Who
Was Inspired By Pablo Picasso.
20. The etchings refer to themes in a
poem by Wallace Stevens, "The
Man with the Blue Guitar". It was
published by Petersburg Press in
October 1977. That year,
Petersburg also published a book,
in which the images were
accompanied by the poem's text.
Hockney was commissioned to
design the cover and pages for the
December 1985 issue of the
French edition of Vogue.
Consistent with his interest in
cubism and admiration for Pablo
Picasso, Hockney chose to paint
Celia Birtwell (who appears in
several of his works) from
different views, as if the eye had
scanned
her face diagonally.
In December 1985, Hockney used
the Quantel Paintbox, a computer
program that allowed the artist to
sketch directly onto the screen.
Using the program was similar to
drawing on the PET film for prints,
with which he had much
experience. The resulting work
was featured in a BBC series that
profiled a number of artists.
His artwork was used on the cover
of the 1989 British Telecom
telephone directory for Bradford.
Hockney returned more frequently
to Yorkshire in the 1990s, usually
every three months, to visit his
mother who died in 1999. He rarely
stayed for more than two weeks
until 1997, when his friend
Jonathan Silver who was terminally
ill encouraged him to capture the
local surroundings. He did this at
first with paintings based on
memory, some from his boyhood.
Hockney returned to Yorkshire for
longer and longer stays, and by
2005 was painting the countryside
en plein air.He set up residence and
an immense redbrick seaside
studio, a converted industrial
workspace, in the seaside town of
Bridlington, about 75 miles from
where he was born. The oil
paintings he produced after 2005
were influenced by his intensive
studies in watercolour (for over a
year in 2003–2004). He created
paintings made of multiple smaller
canvases—nine, 15 or more—
placed together. To help him
visualise work at that scale, he used
digital photographic reproductions;
each day's work was photographed,
and Hockney generally took a
photographic print home.
21. In June 2007, Hockney's largest
painting, Bigger Trees Near Warter,
which measures 15 feet by 40 feet,
was hung in the Royal Academy's
largest gallery in its annual
Summer Exhibition.This work "is a
monumental-scale view of a
coppice in Hockney's native
Yorkshire, between Bridlington
and York. It was painted on 50
individual canvases, mostly
working in situ, over five weeks
last winter." In 2008, he donated
it to the Tate Gallery in London,
saying: "I thought if I'm going to
give something to the Tate I want
to
give them something really good.
It's going to be here for a while. I
don't want to give things I'm not
too proud of ... I thought this was a
good painting because it's of
England ... it seems like a good
thing to do."The painting was the
subject of a BBC1 Imagine film
documentary by Bruno Wollheim
called David Hockney: A Bigger
Picture' (2009) which followed
Hockney as he worked outdoors
over the preceding two years.
Since 2009, Hockney has painted
hundreds of portraits, still lifes
and landscapes using the Brushes
iPhone and iPad application, often
sending them to his friends.
His show Fleurs fraîches (Fresh
flowers) was held at La Fondation
Pierre Bergé in Paris. A Fresh-
Flowers exhibit opened in 2011 at
the Royal Ontario Museum in
Toronto, featuring more than 100
of his drawings on 25 iPads and 20
iPods. In late 2011, Hockney
revisited California to paint
Yosemite National Park on his
iPad.For the season 2012–2013 in
the Vienna State Opera he
designed, on his iPad, a large scale
picture (176 sqm) as part of the
exhibition series Safety Curtain,
conceived by museum in progress.
In September 2016 Hockney
announced the issue of a new book
David Hockney: A Bigger Book,
scheduled to be published in
October by Benedikt Taschen and
costing £1,750 (£3,500 with an
added loose print). The book,
weighing almost 70lbs, had gone
through 19 proof stages.He
unveiled the book at the Frankfurt
Book Fair where he was the
keynote speaker at the opening
press conference.
22. Set designs
Hockney's first opera designs, for
Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at
the Glyndebourne Festival Opera
in England in 1975 and The Magic
Flute (1978) were painted drops.In
1981, he agreed to design sets and
costumes for three 20th-century
French works at the Metropolitan
Opera House with the title Parade.
The works were Parade, a ballet
with music by Erik Satie; Les
mamelles de Tirésias, an opera
with libretto by Guillaume
Apollinaire and music by Francis
Poulenc, and L'enfant et les
sortilèges, an opera with libretto
by Colette and music by Maurice
Ravel.The set for L'enfant et les
sortilèges is a permanent
installation at the Spalding House
branch of the Honolulu Museum of
Art. He designed sets for Puccini's
Turandot in 1991 at the Chicago
Lyric Opera and a Richard Strauss
Die Frau ohne Schatten in 1992 at
the Royal Opera House in
London.In 1994, he designed
costumes and scenery for twelve
opera arias for the TV broadcast of
Plácido Domingo's Operalia in
Mexico City. Technical advances
allowed him to become increasingly
complex in model-making. At his
studio he had a proscenium
opening 6 feet (1.8 m) by 4 feet (1.2
m) in which he built sets in 1:8
scale. He also used a computerised
setup that let him punch in and
program lighting cues at will and
synchronise them to a soundtrack
of the music
23. WIDE OPEN 8 - Call for Artists
Submission Deadline: Early Bird February 19, 2017 or Final Application Deadline March 5, 2017
We are excited to announce our eighth annual national juried art show, Wide Open 8, opening May
13, 2017. And again this year, we are privileged to have another of NY's art elite as our juror, the
Museum of Modern Art's Cara Manes, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and
Sculpture. With her guidance and selections, we look forward to another spectacular show.
Show Details
WIDE OPEN 8: The broad theme of "Wide Open 8" encompasses all the possibilities of knowledge
and freedom and love - wide open spaces...arms wide open...eyes wide open - but as with all
things, there is the inevitable opposite - wide open to attack...corruption...failure. What kind of
fantasy is this? What does it really indicate? This juried show looks to explore the idea of "wide
open" in all the hidden niches of our collective psyche.
Eligibility
This call for submission is open to all residents of the U.S. and its Territories 18 years of age or
older. This is a juried exhibition for artists working in all traditional and non-traditional 2D and 3D
media, including film/video when part of an installation. All artwork must be original in concept,
design and execution. Note: Crafts, kit work or reproductions of original works in other media (such
as giclee reproductions of oil paintings), unless used as part of a mixed media work, will not be
considered.
Submission & Exhibition Dates
Submission Deadline: Early Bird February 19 or Final Application Deadline March 5, 2017.
Gallery Exhibition Dates: May 13 - June 18, 2017 weekends 1-6P.M.
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 13, 2017 from 1-6P.M.
Juror
Cara Manes is Assistant Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of
Modern Art, where she works extensively on the ongoing displays in the collection galleries, as well
as temporary exhibitions and special installations. Most recently she organized Projects104: Nástio
Mosquito (2016) and the collection exhibition Take an Object (2015). Alongside museum
colleagues, she has contributed to numerous other exhibitions, including From the Collection: The
1960s (2016), Ellsworth Kelly: The Chatham Series (2013), Artist's Choice: Trisha Donnelly (2012),
and Cy Twombly: Sculpture (2011). Manes' writing has appeared in a variety of publications,
including Hans Arp and the United States (Stiftung Arp, 2016) and Films and Videos by Robert
Morris (Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves, 2011). She holds degrees from Wellesley
College and The City University of New York.
$3000 in Cash Awards
Bonus Offer
Artists accepted into Wide Open 8 can also send one additional work that will be exhibited in our
Affordable Art area. All works must be smaller than 16" x 20" (including frame, if framed) and must
be priced for sale at $500 or under.
Judging
All judging to enter this competition will be on-line. Entries that differ significantly from their
digital images may be rejected. Decision of the judges is final.
For More Information: http://bwac.org/2016/11/wide-open-8/
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