PORTO.- The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art presents Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974-2014, the inaugural museum survey of geometric mirror works and drawings by the celebrated Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (b. 1924, Qazvin). The exhibition is on view at Serralves from October 9, 2014 – January 11, 2015 and will then travel to the Guggenheim Museum in New York from March 13, 2015 – June 3, 2015.

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility focuses on Monir’s sculptural and graphic works from a career that spans more than forty years. While her practice also encompasses figurative painting, it is the artist’s distinctive approach to geometric abstraction that provides a compelling entry point to an oeuvre in which objective concepts of repetition and progression, merged with the aesthetic traditions of Islamic architecture and decoration, allow for, in the artist’s own words, “infinite possibility.”

The majority of the selected works are from the artist’s own collection, many of which have not been seen publicly since the 1970s. They include early mirror reliefs on plaster and wood, and a series of large-scale geometric mirror-works that formed part of the artist’s exhibition organized by Denise René in her galleries in Paris in 1977, and in New York that same year.

The exhibition reveals how the compositional principles of this period were translated into larger-scaled commissions, including a series of etched glass doors she created for her New York townhouse in the 1980s, and into the more ambitiously-scaled mirror sculptures based on the concept of the geometric ‘families,’ which the artist has produced in the last decade since reinstating her studio in Teheran in 2004.

A selection of previously unseen abstract compositions on paper based on geometric principles produced by Monir between 1976 and 2014 reveals the central role of drawing as a conceptual foundation in the artist’s sculptural practice. The drawings also offer insight into the artist’s creative output when she was deprived of her studio during the early years of exile in the US following the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

A fully illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition and includes an essay by the exhibition’s curator, Suzanne Cotter, on how Monir’s sculptural and graphic works foreground the foundational role of drawing in her oeuvre and the transcultural context of her creative output. Shiva Balaghi (cultural historian of the Middle East and professor of Art History and History at Brown University) contributed a contextual essay on Farmamfarmaian’s work from the 1970s and its development to the present in relation to Iranian artistic, social and political contexts. Media Farzin (New York-based Art historian and critic) has been invited to examine Monir’s career within the historical context of the 1970s (a decade in which her mature geometric works were first made) and in broader cultural and formal terms that embrace notions of craft and decoration. A detailed timeline situates the artist’s personal and artistic trajectory within the broader context of contemporaneous historical, social and cultural events worldwide.

The show also presents the opportunity to premier a new documentary film on Monir directed by Bahman Kiarostami and produced with Iranian curator Leyla Fakhr that looks at the work and life of an artist whose career has been marked by the extremes of political change in her country and abroad.

The exhibition is curated by Suzanne Cotter, Director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, and is organized by the Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal, in association with the Solomon R. Gugenheim Museum, New York, USA.

Born in Qazvin, Iran, in 1924, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian attended the Fine Arts College of Tehran beginning in 1944. Soon after, with the intention of continuing her schooling in art in Paris but deflected by the Second World War, she moved to New York, where she studied at Parsons School of Design and worked as freelance illustrator for Vogue and as graphic and fashion designer. In New York, her group of friends included artists Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, among others. She returned to Iran in 1957 and journeyed across the country, further developing her artistic sensibility through encounters with traditional craftsmanship. Indigenous art forms such as Turcoman pattern, coffee house paintings and the technique of reverse glass painting found their way into her work, resulting in a productive period of artistic discovery and breakthrough. This period culminated in a series of commissions in Iran, exhibitions in Europe and New York, including at Galerie Denise René both in Paris and in New York. The Islamic Revolution in 1979 marked the beginning of Monir’s twenty-six year exile in New York, during which she focused on drawing and a few commissions. In 2004, Monir returned to Iran to re- established her studio there and began working with some of the same craftsmen she had known in the 1970s.

Farmanfarmaian has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Italian Institute, Tehran (1968); the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C. (1976); the Iran‒America Society, Tehran (1976); the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2006); and Leighton House Museum, London (2008). Her work has also been included in a number of group exhibitions including the First Tehran Biennial (1958); Venice Biennales (1958 gold medal recipient, 1964, and 1966); Gold, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1978–79); Power of Ornament, Orangery, Lower Belvedere, Vienna (2009); East-West Divan and Living Traditions: Contemporary Art From Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, Venice Biennale (2009); 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2009–10); There is always a glass of sea for a man to navigate, 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010); Jeff Guys/Monir Farmanfarmaian, Wiels, Brussels (2013); and Iran Modern, Asia Society Museum, New York (2013‒14). Monir’s works are found in numerous public collections, including Tate, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Several of the works from the 1970s are in the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Major commissioned installations are included at the King Abdulaziz Airport in Jeddah; the Dag Hammarskjöld Tower in New York; and the Niavaran Cultural Centre, Teheran.