You can see the image by clicking on 360 degree logos.
 


 

Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam

Autonomous Forms and Articulation of Space:

Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam’s Art

Dr Hamid Keshmirshekan

For seven decades during the most crucial periods of Iranian art Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam has been active as a vigorous artist, educator and writer. He also witnessed the decades of radical changes and transformations in Western art, including the eclipse of modernism and the birth of contemporary art. Having looked at his vast variety of artistic practices, although it seems that he has absorbed the contextual preference of these shifts, he has deliberately chosen his own path and artistic strategy which is not precisely complying with any of the pre-existing formats. Vaziri further played a significant role in promotion of modern painting and sculpture as forms of artistic expression thorough his teaching activities and writings in the 1960s and 1970s. It was in fact in line with the earlier attempts of pioneers of the previous generation who succeeded in formulation of modern poetry, literature and art. During the years when he taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Faculty of Decorative Arts he trained a number of modernists from the new generation who were extremely influential all through the next decades.1 

The decades of the 1950s and 1960s also witnessed appreciation of national and cultural identity coupled with celebration of ‘national art’ and its representation in Iranian culture and art. This idea was then manifested in the works of many modernist artists. It is in this very context that Vaziri’s art seems quite self-governing, taking distance from any popular movement or tendencies within the country. Unlike many artists of his generation who were deeply involved in the issue of cultural identity in line with appropriation of Western stylistic formats, he deliberately distanced himself from reflection of any local theme. Perhaps he more than many other Iranian modernists has avoided reflecting narrative or literary reference to specific Iranian mythological or mystical implications. He rather believes any attempt to make an ‘Iranian art’ is condemned, as it would impose limitation to art and its origin.

Although Vaziri used elements from traditional Iranian art and architecture in his early works in the 1950s – reflecting the familiar modern styles such as Matisse’s Fauvism and geometric, stylised and colourful forms of Paul Klee – he never came back to this in his later periods. His later stages of artistic career demonstrate that although he has never abandoned his interest in modern masters – Klee in particular is discernible – he has moved to pure abstraction. Hence abstract values of forms, colours, lines, rhythm and spatial movement are among the most notable elements in his works throughout his long career. Using two-dimensional geometric shapes with bright colours in his later works, he created various experimental works with the use of various materials and media. In these works (Sand Paintings in particular) he was influenced by European Informal Art and American Abstract Expressionism, specifically Action Painting and its spontaneity. His informal material-oriented and gestural works, however, seem playful and calculated: they are intuitive but at the same time are intellectual treatments of material on two-dimensional canvas.

Vaziri’s continuous interest in experimenting with unconventional materials led him to work on a series of rhythmic reliefs made up of aluminium and iron sheets in the late 1960s. Shortly after he developed his style through a unique series of articulated mobile sculptures. During the 1970s he developed this approach through Fear and Flight series, the colourful version of the mobile sculptures but now attached to the two-dimensional canvases. In turn these sculptures inspired a series of paintings that marked a return to the well-defined shapes of his three-dimensional works. What would be discerned from the artist’s involvement in all these sets of works, both painting and sculpture, is a constant appreciation of the essential theme of ‘space’.

Vaziri is a sincere advocate of modernism as an international language and vividly promotes this belief both in his writings and works. His ahistorical works are materialisation of this certainty and his insistence on formal values of an artwork is an attempt to defend autonomy of art and its independence from any external agent, being narration, literary references or social implications. It is according to this belief that his art does not depict any political or geographical dependence. If the language of modern art is globalised, this art is rather liberated from geographical determination, free from cultural dependencies or local traditions. Creating apolitical paintings and sculptures without reference to any ethnic or environmental icons or pre-existing formula is a distinguishing feature in Vaziri’s artistic career. This would be reminiscent of the most influential definition of the concept of Abstraction – perhaps the dominant aspiration of 20th-century art, both in the West and other lands where modernism was appropriated – formulated by Clement Greenberg. In ‘Modernist Painting’, he suggests that ‘each art would be rendered “pure”, and in its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. “Purity” meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.’2 An attempt at a consensus definition of abstraction might be that an abstract work of art is a production that creates a highly singular and effectively unprecedented visual experience. Vaziri’s almost entire body of works represents this self-definition and singularity of an artwork. His works, both paintings and sculptures, show a strong sensitivity towards pure and autonomous forms, colours and articulation of space that accompanied him throughout his entire career. Vaziri’s art suggests an alternative but solid and masterful modernism in Iranian context which avoids any kind of nostalgic return to the familiar stereotypes.

October 2015

1In those years, he
started writing a number
of art textbooks which
all showed his deep
interest and belief in
modern art and its

foundations.

2Clement Greenberg,
‘Modernist Painting’,
in Art in Theory
1900-2000, eds,
Charles Harrison &
Paul Wood (Malden,
Oxford: Blackwell), p.
775