The women I’m still making are her body,” she says. Fayyazi’s first model was her grandmother at 80: “I was so drawn to her physical presence, her fleshy, voluptuous body, and asked her to pose for me nude - which she did with such pleasure for my camera. Partly inspired by Louise Bourgeois, Fayyazi moved from ceramics to installations, using yarn and plaster. There are also layered meanings in the suspended yarn sculptures of women by Bita Fayyazi (born in 1962), though “all my works are collaborative,” she says. ‘Beautiful Creatures - One Foot Grounded, The Other Dancing Till . . . (The Red Shoes Classic)’ (2022-23) by Bita Fayyazi © Courtesy the artist/Dastan “They look like traditional ornaments - until you look closely.” Her interest is partly in “how governments glorify war how they present something so dark as if it were beautiful”. The delicate decorative beauty of Ossouli’s paintings is deceptive, she says: “What you see can be the exact opposite of reality.” In the margins and illuminations, she adds batons, riot police, planes and bombs. She tackled the complexity of Iranian history in surreal video installations such as “Rabbit in Wonderland”, in which an animated rabbit, an innocent amid geopolitical forces, encounters a map of Iran embodied in the Cheshire Cat, and meets Mohammad Mosaddegh, the prime minister ousted in 1953 in a US-sponsored coup for aspiring to take control of Iran’s own oil. Lashai, also a bestselling novelist who translated Brecht into Persian, was jailed under the shah for having leftwing political sympathies. Her work is “prophetic, bringing in emotion and politics”, says the artist Sam Samiee, who curated a recent retrospective in Abu Dhabi, Farideh Lashai: Afloat over Undulations.
SUBVERSION LOCKED SERIES
Farideh Lashai (1944-2013) ranged from glass design and semi-abstract painting (a 2008 oil from the Trees series is at Frieze) to video and installations, in dialogue with works including Goya’s Disasters of War and Alice in Wonderland. The other four artists on show at Frieze largely remained in Iran. Sadr left Iran for Paris soon after the revolution and died in Corsica. The artist’s rebellious life has been as inspirational as her work, as glimpsed in Behjat Sadr: Suspended Time (2006), a documentary made by an admiring younger artist, Mitra Farahani.įarideh Lashai in the 1960s © Courtesy Farideh Lashai Foundation Sadr photographed the pipelines and platforms of Iran’s oilfields in the 1970s, whose wealth enabled lavish art patronage under the shah and his empress wife, Farah - a system in which Sadr participated (taking part in the empress’s Shiraz-Persepolis Festival in 1968) but which she also reviled for its favouritism and control. “Black was her passion, her true impulse for more than 20 years,” Montazami says - possibly a metaphor for oil. As the artist noted in her diary, “I did not use my calligraphy or Iranian motifs in my canvas to stimulate national pride among my compatriots or the curiosity of strangers.” Among her radical experiments were Op Art reflective paintings on Venetian blinds (disparaged by one male critic as “housewife art”) and black paint on shiny aluminium.
In contrast to Iran’s Saqqakhana school of art, which incorporated Persian motifs into Modern art in the 1960s, Sadr’s feverish abstraction, often inspired by nature, is more lyrical and free, as seen in an untitled oil-on-paper painting at Frieze made shortly before her death. Untitled (2009) by Behjat Sadr will be at Frieze New York at Dastan © ADAGP/DACS. Two of her paintings appeared in the Whitechapel Gallery’s recent show of female abstract expressionists in London. Though Sadr (1924-2009) became known as the first female director of Tehran university’s visual arts department in the early 1970s, her art was not recognised by a major retrospective until the 1990s. She was “one of the first women artists in the global south to make a courageous stand for abstract and experimental practice” from the mid-1950s as an art student in Rome and Naples. “She was a rebel Modernist ahead of her time,” says Morad Montazami, who curated Sadr’s first UK solo show, Dusted Waters, at the Mosaic Rooms in 2018. Behjat Sadr c1963 © Archives of the Endowment Fund Behjat SADRīehjat Sadr’s photographed hand appears amid thick black strokes applied with a palette knife in a “photo-painting” on view in Realism, a recent Dastan group show in London.
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