AZIZ ART
February 2017
Monir Farmanfarmaian David Hockney Mohammed Kazem
Co m pe tit io n
1-Monir Farmanfarmaian 7-Competition 8-Mohammed Kazem 12-David Hockney 21-Competition
Director: Aziz Anzabi Editor : Nafiseh Yaghoubi Translator : Asra Yaghoubi Research: Zohreh Nazari
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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 York via steamer boat, when World mosaic techniques of her Iranian War II derailed plans to study art in heritage with the rhythms of Paris, France. In New York, she modern Western geometric studied at Cornell University, at abstraction. Parsons The New School for Design, Education where she majored in fashion Born to educated parents in the illustration, and at the Art Students religious town of Qazvin in north- League. As a fashion illustrator, she western Iran, Farmanfarmaian held various freelance jobs, acquired artistic skills early in working with magazines such as childhood, receiving drawing Glamour before being hired by the lessons from a tutor and studying Bonwit Teller department store, postcard depictions of western where she made the acquaintance art.After studying at the University of a young Andy Warhol. of Tehran at the Faculty of Fine Art Additionally, she learned more in 1944, she then moved to New 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 1 Joan Mitchell.
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 “highdomed hall… covered in tiny square, triangular, and hexagonal mirrors,”
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.
She sought out paintings behind glass, traditional tribal jewelry and potteries, and amassed one of the greatest collections of "coffeehouse 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 coauthored 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, caraballofarman, 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
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Mohammed Kazem
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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,
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 nationstate,” 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 cocurated 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.
Davd Hockney
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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.
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 Personal life reputation, the RCA changed its Hockney was born in Bradford, regulations and awarded the England, to Laura and Kenneth diploma. Hockney (a conscientious objector A visit to California, where he in the Second World War), the subsequently lived for many years, fourth of five children.He was inspired him to make a series of educated at Wellington Primary paintings of swimming pools in the School, Bradford Grammar School, comparatively new acrylic medium Bradford College of Art (where his rendered in a highly realistic style teachers included Frank Lisle and using vibrant colours. his fellow students included
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 decadelong 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 1,643square-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 fivebedroomed former guesthouse, for ÂŁ625,000, cutting all his remaining ties with the town.
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.
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.
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.
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 FreshFlowers 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.
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
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: Nรกstio 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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