Mitra farahani biography of martin
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How Reclusive Artist Bahman Mohassess Shaped Iranian Modernism—and Buried His Own Legacy
Bahman Mohassess is considered Iran’s most important modernist, and has been dubbed the “Persian Picasso.” But for nearly five decades of his career, he lived outside the public eye in Italy, and his countrymen even thought he was dead. Now, however, there is no missing the many contributions of Mohassess, who is best known for his paintings of anthropomorphic figures that allude to international political conflict.
It only took a few years for curators to take note of Mohassess after he died at 79 in 2010. In 2014, he was included in “Unedited History,” an important survey of Iranian contemporary art at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and that same year, London’s Tate Modern acquired a group of five 1966 gouache paintings depicting his signature sculpture-like faceless heads. In 2017, long-unseen works Mohassess from the permanent collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art were showcased in Iran’s capital, where they appeared alongside paintings by Francis Bacon, whose fleshy forms Mohassess is said to have taken as inspiration. Just weeks ago, Minotauro sulla riva del mare (1977), a painting depicting a nak
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Groupe Mobile : retracing picture social strength of mind of artworks through photography
From February 13 to July 2, 2016
With Yaacov Agam, Andrea Ancira (Pernod Ricard Fellow), Ellie Armon Azoulay, Kemi Bassene, Yogesh Barve, Kim Beom, Jean Bhownagary, Judy Blum Reddy, Constantin Brancusi, Alexanders Calder, Luis Camnitzer, Campsite, Esther Pick on, Clark Piedаterre Initiative, Camille Chenais, Justin Daraniyagala, Jochen Dehn, Cristiana de Marchi, Max Painter, Mitra Farahani, Joanna Fiduccia, Alberto Sculpturer, Alberto Greco, Zarina Hashmi, Iris Haüssler, MF Hussain, Sonia Khurana, J.D. Kirszenbaum, Naresh Kumar, Emmanuelle Lainé, Laura Lamiel, Life Later Life, Nalini Malani, V.V. Malvankar, Ernest Mancoba, Julie Martin & Billy Klüver, Henri Painter, Tyeb Mehta, Adrián Melis, Marta Minujín, Martine Mollo, Juana Pounder, Tsuyoshi Director, Prabhakar Pachpute, Akbar Padamsee, Amol K Patil, Rupali Patil, Pablo Picasso, Prince Quinn, Nikhil Raunak, Chap Ray, Avatar Reddy, Prince Ruscha, Gerard Sekoto, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Sumesh Sharma, Amrita Sher-Gil, Shunya, Francis Newton Souza, Pisurwo Jitendra Suralkar, Sharmeen Syed, Jiři Trnka, Marc Vaux, Marie Vassilieff, Georges Visconti, Susan Vogel, Corner Wolukau-Wanambwa, Carolingian Zelnik current many others.
Curators: Mélanie Bouteloup & Virginie Bobin
Wi
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In the late ’90s, while doing some globe-trotting research for a book on Iranian cinema (which only culminated with the release this week of my In the Time of Kiarostami: Writings on Iranian Cinema), I went to England to interview one of that cinema’s legendary characters. I took a train to Sussex from London, then jumped in a taxi. The filmmaker, who’d lived in England for decades, was aged, so I suspected the address I had might lead me to a small bungalow at a retirement home. But when the cab pulled up to the address, I was astonished to see something entirely different: an enormous, ornate mansion that might also be described as a castle or palace.
Ebrahim Golestan was just as imposing as his abode. Because people had described the reclusive auteur with words like irascible, fearsome, and unapproachable (some told me I was crazy to seek him out), I was nervous when I knocked on the mansion’s huge front door. But Golestan—white-haired yet physically robust—opened it and welcomed me warmly. Over the next two hours, I discovered he was full of feisty, sometimes scathing opinions on various subjects and proud of his work. As a young man in Iran, he pursued a literary career, translating foreign authors like Hemingway, and then founded a film company and d