FARSHID MALEKI | Totem

Collection of the Artist, Tehran
Hoor Art Gallery, Tehran
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2014

Tehran, Talar e Gandriz, Farshid Maleki, 1973 -1974 (exact date unknown)
Tehran, Hoor Art Gallery, Farshid Maleki's Paintings, 2014

Condition: This work is in very good condition. Any surface imperfection across the work is inherent to the artist's creative process. Ten pinhole sized nail holes across the four edges, inherent. Some very faint surface abrasions to the four corner edges and a minor paint chip to the upper right corner. No signs of restoration under the UV light. Colours: The colours in the catalogue illustration are accurate but fail to convey the depth and the three-dimensionality of the work. Furthermore, the catalogue illustration fails to convey the intense red paint across the vertical central axis of the painting.
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Widely recognised as a master of Iranian modernism, in recent years Farshid Maleki has come to enjoy well-deserved and belated international success.  He was born in Tehran in 1943 where he continues to live, work, and teach fine arts.  In addition to his painting and teaching, he has also worked as an art critic, which allowed him a different perspective – to look at art from the outside in. In his teaching and mentoring of younger generations of Iranian artists both in Tehran and Isfahan, Maleki has been an important influence in the evolution of the current art production. During his formative years he met and befriended other soon-to-be-famous artists such as Manouchehr Safarzadeh, Mehdi Sahabi, Mohammadreza Aslani, Iraj Anvari, Mohammad Nasiri and Simin Nategh. Mansour Ghandriz was one year ahead of him at university, and became a strong influence on Maleki and his peers. In 1966, Maleki began his collaboration with the famous and radical art space the Iranian Hall (Talar e Iran), later called Ghandriz Hall (Talar e Gandriz). The space was founded by Rouben Pakbaz and exhibited a wide variety of artists including Mansour Ghandriz and Bahman Mohasses. The gallery and the artists were crucial in promoting a new form of artistic expression/output, and were part of the natural evolution of the same line of questioning that surrounded the Saqqakaneh art Group in the 1960s. Pakbaz asked Maleki to introduce some of his classmates from the School of Decorative Arts to promote his gallery and consequently many of them exhibited there.  In 1968, Maleki received his BA and that same year exhibited his first paintings at the gallery. These painting later became part of the Totem series, the first of which with linoleum etchings.  Farshid Maleki’s Totem works, painted between 1971 and 1973 where mostly exhibited in Ghandriz Hall during those years. They contain a trace of the social shifts of the time but also are heavily embedded in the motifs of Iranian art history. The first thing that these paintings challenged was the artistic direction that the Ghandriz Hall was debating on; i.e. the problem of identity of Persian art in relation to Western art, as well as the social function of art in a fast changing country. Throughout the evolution of these Totem works, there is always a tension between the idea of the word and the image. This is where the virtual sparks that become actualized in Maleki’s later works can first be identified. By 1973 he had his second solo exhibition at the Ghandriz Hall where he first presented his Totems and Wall Hangings, which were his most radical paintings to date.  While the public did not initially show a positive reaction, the important critic and artist Hannibal Alkhas wrote an article in the Keyhan newspaper where he compared Malekis work to totems most often found in African and Oceanic art. From Maleki’s point of view, these works were an homage to Mansour Ghandriz after whom the Iranian Hall had been named in his honour following his tragic death. Since these beginnings, Maleki has had numerous solo exhibitions, and has also shown both at Thomas Erben gallery in NY, and at Isabelle van den Ende Gallery in Dubai. His unique compositions and individualistic expressiveness mark his works with a distinctiveness that has hailed him as one of the most enduring artists of our time.