Leila Heller Gallery presents Between the Flower and the Mountain: Woodcut Prints and Darbandsar Mountains, 1981-1987, the solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed Iranian artist Farideh Lashai. It displays her prints from the Vase Series and abstract paintings depicting landscapes and natural elements. The show will end on 14 November 2023.
Lashai was born in 1944 in Rasht, Iran, so the landscape of the Caspian Sea still influences her work. In 1950, her family moved to Tehran, where Lashai, a child passionate about art, took lessons from Jafar Petgars, a prominent Iranian artist.
Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai, 2023.
In 1962, Lashai went to Germany to study German literature at the University of Frankfurt, from which she graduated with a BA. In Munich, Lashai enrolled at a school for translation. She discovered the works of the Group 47 literary circle and became fascinated with Bertolt Brecht’s theatre. Lashai translated several of his works. She also published her poems in Jahan-e No (a literary magazine). Besides, her literary projects include The Jackal Came (2003), a fictionalised autobiography describing the lives of three generations of women in Iranian society.
Lashai pursued her education at the Academy of Decorative Arts in Vienna, Austria, where she obtained a BA in Glass Design. In 1966, the artist started working at Riedel Studios (a famous Austrian glass manufacturer) and studied crystal design and carving there. Two years later, Lashai displayed her crystal art pieces at Crystelleria Duomo in Milan. The same year, she began to work at Rosenthal in Bavaria, one of the world’s leading crystal manufacturers.
Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai, 2023.
Lashai’s first solo exhibition took place at Tehran Gallery in 1973. The artworks on view depicted the wild northern Iranian environments as colourful shapes and forms balancing between figuration and abstraction. Not painting details, the artist aimed to create a symbol and vague understanding of nature, so her works would evoke the feeling of it.
Gradually, the artist became interested in the moving image: she created elaborate animations and projected them onto the surface of her paintings. Lashai produced dynamic artworks based on Disasters of War by Goya, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and the Hawks and Sparrows film (1966) by Pier Paolo Pasolini. In her later years, Lashai delved into surrealism to escape from the harsh realities of the world.
The artist has showcased her creations in multiple solo and group exhibitions: the 18th Biennale of Sydney (Australia, 2012); Identity Crisis: Authenticity, Attribution and Appropriation (the Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY, USA, 2011); Painting (Mah Art Gallery, Tehran, 2010); and many others. Lashai’s artworks have been added to esteemed private and public collections such as the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum, Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the British Museum in London, Sharjah Art Foundation, to name a few.
To learn more about Woodcut Prints, 1981 to 1987, please visit the exhibition’s official web page.
You might also be interested in attending Arodo by Karolina Krasouli.
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