RESERVOIRS OF MEMORIES
– Farhad Moshiri
Introduction
Date
1-31 May 2003.
Preview
6.30-8.30pm, 1 May 2003.
Venue
Leighton House Museum, 12 Holland Park Road, London W14.
Organised by
Rose Issa in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation.
Supported by
Delfina Studios.
Admission
Free.
Opening times
All week except Tuesdays 11am to 5pm.
Enquires
020 7602 3316.
Introduction
An exhibition of Farhad Moshiri’s monumental jars painted on
canvas, which are impressive vessels, containers of desire and
memory, and eulogies on the simple pleasures of life.
This is the first
exhibition in London and he is presenting the series of
paintings – variations on the theme of a simple vessel form
– that have mostly one colour that he associates with a word,
sentence or childhood memory: favourite juices (Ab Anar Tazeh
– fresh pomegranate juice), fruits (Miveh va Tareh bar
– sweet Isfahani melons or the grapes of Shahroud) and
traditional dishes (Kaleh Pache). Sometimes he employs
lines of juxtaposed texts, extracts of poems or vernacular words
used in daily life in Tehran.
Moshiri was born in
1963 in Shiraz, Iran, and studied fine arts at CALARTS in
California. In America he first started experimenting with
installations, video art and painting before coming back to
Tehran in 1991. He loves collecting old pottery, and seeks to
render the age-old relationship between ceramic form and
function by focusing on paint as an expressive visual media. His
painted jars look like three dimensional objects, bursting with
popular foods, drinks and deserts that evoke the street vendors
that sell them. Elegant popular scripts, recognisable,
distinctive reflections of bygone local culture, are written on
the body of the large painted jars, like an epigraph that can be
read as a prayer or a wish.
The
striking elegant shape of the vessels, with their thick bodies,
simple contours and unobtrusive coloured surfaces, are inspired
by the antique goblets, jars and bottles discovered on the
6000-year old site of Susa, Sassanid pots and the work of 13th
century Iranian potters. Moshiri’s massive undecorated
sand-glazed jars, of simple primal forms, resemble the
utilitarian stoneware jars used for preserving and storing
grain, rice and tea leaves, or for cooling water or housing
offerings.
The
texture of the paintings resemble the crackled ice glaze,
reflecting the artist’s appreciation of unglazed or naturally
glazed stoneware vessels; a texture reminiscent of thick coils
of un-worked clay and the colours of old pieces in the
monochrome ceramic tradition that flourished in ancient Iran.
The use of layers of different tones of the same colour, plain
bold colours, the sheer simplicity of the form and the modesty
of the words chosen, all reflect Moshiri’s love of Zen
philosophy and aesthetics.
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