Hossein Zenderoudi

Frank Stella

Ghahvakhaneh art style

AZIZ ART October 2017

Director: Aziz Anzabi Editor : Nafiseh Yaghoubi Translator : Asra Yaghoubi Research: Zohreh Nazari

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1-Hossein Zenderoudi 9-Frank Stella 18-Competition 19-Ghahvekhaneh art style

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Hossein Zenderoudi

Hossein Zenderoudi (born 1937 Tehran) is an Iranian painter and sculptor, known especially as a pioneer of Iranian modern art. His work Tchaar Bagh was sold at Christi's International auction in Dubai for $1.6 million. Hossein Zenderoudi is the man of measure in communication, a measure conditioned by memory, which is an essential factor in the artist’s distancing of creativity from the semantic and formal elements of his idiom. This globalizing memory is that of a continuing Shiite Islam, but also of 2500 years of Persian antiquity dominated by the reformist Zenderoudi was soon attracted by writing. Being the support of communication, writing is also the depository of sacredness, or more exactly, of its trace. In the eternal struggle between good and evil, the sacred manifests its presence by summoning us back to the two essential options, truth and justice. Art in its references to it proposes the trace of good: the trace and not the traced. This distinction is the linchpin of Zenderoudi’s intuition, forming the inner

guidance that governs the whole development of his oeuvre. Arabic calligraphy offers an inexhaustible reservoir of signs, dots, letters and numbers, from which the trace of being in real life can be re-established. Zenderoudi was still a student at the fine arts school of his home city when he laid the foundations in 1960 for a pictorial movement that was to renovate the spirit of eastern gestural writing: the Sagha Khaneh school. The school, which gets its name from the fountain-stops decorated with popular illuminations or with verses from the Koran, where passers-by can quench their thirst, gives writing the sacredness of an existential quotidian magic. A prize-winner at the Paris Biennale the following year, Zenderoudi settled in Paris in 1961. There he developed a robustly original graphic style which established itself brilliantly within the moving lyrical abstraction of the time, halfway between the free action of Informel and the signifying-signified dialectic of Lettrisme.

Zenderoudi arrived in Paris at the end of the widespread infatuation with gestural calligraphy. He was able to ascertain for himself the signifying limits of the traced in writing, and to boost his crucial intuition of graphic distance through trace. The immediate trace of the sign is its imprint: and in each period of his work the artist turned to stamping imprints. There are traces of it in the first compositions at the Sagha Khaneh school, in 1958-60, on oiled brown wrapping papers or linens, where wads represent votive padlocks. Their repetitive and accumulative composition continued throughout the ‘90s, notably in the series of cities or in that of the Virgin of Constantinople. From 1999 and in the past two years, Zenderoudi has substituted the photographic negative for the printing of signs or images. Views of Iranian landscapes emerge from wide colour fields animated by broad strokes of vibrant paint, thus bringing us to the tip of continuity in the structural weft of writing traced in Zenderoudi’s work: the fleeting evocation of reality in the

pictorial flow of global communication. In 1961 the artist had kept his distance from the gestural conformity of lyrical abstraction, by developing the quantitative language technique of repetitive stamping imprints, as did Arman in early works like “Les Cachets” (1955-58). In 1999 Zenderoudi turned to another technique of quantitative language: that of the photographic transfer. This type of transfer is of capital importance if we are to judge the present dimension of an oeuvre founded on spiritual tradition, linked to a holy scripture and thus devoted to a certain referential continuity, but dominated by an “inner guidance”: that of a necessity for global communication. The requirement of global communication implies two objectives in the public’s reception of the message, namely semantic transmission and spiritual participation. The two keys to its interpretation are indissolubly welded in the spirit of their creator:

“Men the world over are identical and can all read my work. What matters is to achieve a harmony between the person who created it and the spectator” This twofold goal sets the true measure of the creative act in Zenderoudi’s work, of the supple and adaptable climate of spiritual realism that surrounds it. That is the lesson of profound humanism drawn from his Koranic culture and from the teachings of the theologian Ostad Elahi: the soul is the object of knowledge, which implies the superseding of any dichotomy between matter and mind, rationalism and spirituality. Significantly, the artist has illustrated the Koran and illuminated Ostad Elahi’s “Traces of Truth”, which are prominent among his contributions to the bibliophily of high spirituality. Suppleness in the transmission of his message has enabled Zenderoudi at various points in his career to cut out a cultural situation for himself and to ensure its actuality in an original and specific way. After Sagha Khaneh

came the Parisian Informel and Lettrisme. Faithful to his strategy of detachment from calligraphy, Zenderoudi favours the trace as opposed to the traced, in writing. To favour the trace compared to the traced is to divert the sign in order better to appropriate it. When Zenderoudi introduces the printed image of the Angel or of the Virgin of Constantinople into his work, he remains faithful to the demand for communication. He presents the trace of an icon within the global flow of information, and there it admirably transmits its message of transcendental spirituality. In the panorama of global culture everything has its place: be it black bryony, the Jesus label or the Coca Cola logo. A closeness to the public’s heart always occurs at the right level of each spectator’s affectivity. Zenderoudi’s spiritual realism allows him to believe in the truth and justice of communicational space: the soul is equally at ease in the dense fabric of a calligraphic weave, in the immaterial ether of a media flow, or on an evanescent and fleeting monitor screen.

Yes, my dear Hossein, you have convinced me: I find the same “warmth of distance” in a canvas print in mixed medium dated 1994 as in a coloured photographic transfer of the Iranian desert in 2001. Another canvas done in 1994 was titled “Luminous Instants”. Now I await many more of these luminous instants, in the photomechanical style brought into fashion by Andy Warhol forty years ago and which you have today sealed with your own unmistakable trace of justice and truth. You are mentioned, Hossein, as an example of East-West synthesis. Rather than confine myself to noticing its effect, I prefer to retrace an analysis of its cause, which lies in that demand for global communication, the manifestation of a fundamental intuition which made you drop the self-reductive voluntarism of a formalist trace of writing to the advantage of a supple system of traces. In assuming the distanced memory of an original language, these traces liberate its universal value. When they distance

themselves from the Arabic alphabet traced, to assume the form of architectures of signs or of inner landscapes, woven fabrics of meditation, I submit to their spellbinding power and find it perfectly normal for the titles given to these works to stress their linguistic detachment. After all, never mind if there is more or less water in the glasses and so much the better if one can take tea together. I undergo in all its plenitude the visual effect of the message's global communication. No plenitude without saturation. Today the destiny of images in the global flow of communication is played out on the evanescence of the television screen. The trace of the electronic image conveyed by media also experiences its saturation effect: diluted in the total jamming of the screen at the end of a broadcast or programme. Don’t the “inner spaces” saturated with Zenderoudi’s signs herald the trace of another saturation of visual language - that of the small screen open onto an empty chain of programmes? What difference is there,

from the point of view of the distancing of memory, between a screen saturated with electronic impulses without any informative impact, and a canvas entirely covered with the traces of signs of an anonymous writing? None at all: the two effects of saturation belong within the same operational logic as the demand for global communication. And it is to that logic that Zenderoudi responds instinctively when he switches from the italic sign to the image, and also when he incorporates the printed or photographic trace on canvas or paper depicting the space of that informative impact of the artist’s global message. Hossein Zenderoudi is the bearer of a precious gift: a fundamental intuition that drove him straight away in his art to speak of just and true things by their trace and to create an effect of detachment in the artist’s and in the public’s memory. What is the exact proportion of East and West in this major option and its spectacular virtue of

enchantment? It matters little, it is the mystery of God’s talent and finger. It is in any case upon this concept of distanced memory that the entire philosophy of media information and its supreme end-purpose, global communication, rests today. Distance brings the media public closer to the depth of a conceptual field indispensable to the global perception of the message addressed to it, whatever its semantic density may be. Hossein Zenderoudi thus finds himself quite naturally in the midst of the most topical issue affecting the globalizing world of information. His work provides the establishment of a planetary ascendancy by electronic media with a universalist reference and individual answer. At this early point in the third millennium of the Christian era, this Iranian citizen of the world without frontiers of spiritual thought and of media information, seems to me more than ever like the man of true and just measure in communication. http://www.zenderoudi.com/english/english.html

Frank Philip Stella

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Frank Philip Stella born May 12, 1936 is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella lives and works in New York City. Biography Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts,to parents of Italian descent. His father was a gynecologist, and his mother was an artistically inclined housewife who attended a fashion school and later took up landscape painting. After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he learned about abstract modernists Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann, he attended Princeton University, where he majored in history and met Darby Bannard and Michael Fried. Early visits to New York art galleries fostered his artistic development, and his work was influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Stella moved to New York in 1958, after his graduation. He is one of the most well-regarded postwar American

painters still working today.He is heralded for creating abstract paintings that bear no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting. As of 2015, Stella lives in Greenwich Village and keeps an office there but commutes on weekdays to his studio in Rock Tavern, New York. Work Late 1950s and early 1960s Upon moving to New York City, he reacted against the expressive use of paint by most painters of the abstract expressionist movement, instead finding himself drawn towards the "flatter" surfaces of Barnett Newman's work and the "target" paintings of Jasper Johns. He began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object, rather than the picture as a representation of something, be it something in the physical world, or something in the artist's emotional world. Stella married Barbara Rose, later a well-known art critic, in 1961-1969.

Around this time he said that a picture was "a flat surface with paint on it - nothing more". This was a departure from the technique of creating a painting by first making a sketch. Many of the works are created by simply using the path of the brush stroke, very often using common house paint. This new aesthetic found expression in a series of new paintings, the Black Paintings (59) in which regular bands of black paint were separated by very thin pinstripes of unpainted canvas. Die Fahne Hoch! (1959) is one such painting. It takes its name "The Raised Banner" from the first line of the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the anthem of the National Socialist German Workers Party, and Stella pointed out that it is in the same proportions as banners used by that organization. It has been suggested that the title has a double meaning, referring also to Jasper Johns' paintings of flags. In any case, its emotional coolness belies the contentiousness its title might suggest, reflecting this new direction in Stella's work. Stella’s art was recognized for its

innovations before he was twenty-five. In 1959, several of his paintings were included in "Three Young Americans" at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, as well as in "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (60). From 1960 Stella began to produce paintings in aluminium and copper paint which, in their presentation of regular lines of color separated by pinstripes, are similar to his black paintings. However they use a wider range of colors, and are his first works using shaped canvases (canvases in a shape other than the traditional rectangle or square), often being in L, N, U or T-shapes. These later developed into more elaborate designs, in the Irregular Polygon series (67), for example. Also in the 1960s, Stella began to use a wider range of colors, typically arranged in straight or curved lines. Later he began his Protractor Series (71) of paintings, in which arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders are arranged side-by-side to produce full and half circles painted in rings of concentric color.

These paintings are named after circular cities he had visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s. The Irregular Polygon canvases and Protractor series further extended the concept of the shaped canvas. Late 1960s and early 1970s Stella began his extended engagement with printmaking in the mid-1960s, working first with master printer Kenneth Tyler at Gemini G.E.L. Stella produced a series of prints during the late 1960s starting with a print called Quathlamba I in 1968. Stella's abstract prints used lithography, screenprinting, etching and offset lithography. In 1967, he designed the set and costumes for Scramble, a dance piece by Merce Cunningham. The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Stella’s work in 1970, making him the youngest artist to receive one.[citation needed] During the following decade, Stella introduced relief into his art, which he came to call “maximalist” painting for its

sculptural qualities. The shaped canvases took on even less regular forms in the Eccentric Polygon series, and elements of collage were introduced, pieces of canvas being pasted onto plywood, for example. His work also became more three-dimensional to the point where he started producing large, free-standing metal pieces, which, although they are painted upon, might well be considered sculpture. After introducing wood and other materials in the Polish Village series (73), created in high relief, he began to use aluminum as the primary support for his paintings. As the 1970s and 1980s progressed, these became more elaborate and exuberant. Indeed, his earlier Minimalism became baroque, marked by curving forms, Day-Glo colors, and scrawled brushstrokes. Similarly, his prints of these decades combined various printmaking and drawing techniques. In 1973, he had a print studio installed in his New York house. In 1976, Stella was commissioned by BMW to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL for the second installment in the BMW Art Car Project.

He has said of this project, "The starting point for the art cars was racing livery. In the old days there used to be a tradition of identifying a car with its country by color. Now they get a number and they get advertising. It’s a paint job, one way or another. The idea for mine was that it’s from a drawing on graph paper. The graph paper is what it is, a graph, but when it’s morphed over the car’s forms it becomes interesting, and adapting the drawing to the racing car’s forms is interesting. Theoretically it’s like painting on a shaped canvas." In 1969, Stella was commissioned to create a logo for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial. Medals incorporating the design were struck to mark the occasion. 1980s and afterward From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Stella created a large body of work that responded in a general way to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. During this time, the increasingly deep relief of Stella’s paintings gave way to full three-dimensionality, with sculptural forms derived from cones,

pillars, French curves, waves, and decorative architectural elements. To create these works, the artist used collages or maquettes that were then enlarged and re-created with the aids of assistants, industrial metal cutters, and digital technologies. La scienza della pigrizia , from 1984, is an example of Stella's transition from two-dimensionality to three-dimensionality. It is fabricated from oil paint, enamel paint, and alkyd paint on canvas, etched magnesium, aluminum and fiberglass. In the 1990s, Stella began making free-standing sculpture for public spaces and developing architectural projects. In 1993, for example, he created the entire decorative scheme for Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre, which includes a 10,000-square-foot mural. His 1993 proposal for a Kunsthalle and garden in Dresden did not come to fruition. In 1997, he painted and oversaw the installation of the 5,000-square-foot "Stella Project" which serves as the centerpiece of the theater and lobby of the Moores Opera House

located at the Rebecca and John J. Moores School of Music on the campus of the University of Houston, in Houston, TX. His aluminum bandshell, I nspired by a folding hat from Brazil, was built in downtown Miami in 2001; a monumental Stella sculpture was installed outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Stella's wall-hung Scarlatti K Series was triggered by the harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and the writings of the U.S. 20th-century harpsichord virtuoso and musicologist Ralph Kirkpatrick, who made the sonatas widely known. (The title's "K" refers to Kirkpatrick's chronology numbers.) Scarlatti wrote more than 500 keyboard sonatas; Stella's series today includes about 150 works. From 1978 to 2005, Stella owned the Van Tassell and Kearney Horse Auction Mart building in Manhattan's East Village and used

it as his studio. His nearly 30-year stewardship of the building resulted in the facade being cleaned and restored. After a six-year campaign by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, in 2012 the historic building was designated a New York City Landmark. After 2005, Stella split his time between his West Village apartment and his Newburgh, New York studio. Artists' rights Stella had been an advocate of strong copyright protection for artists such as himself. On June 6, 2008, Stella with Artists Rights Society president Theodore Feder; Stella is a member artist of the Artists Rights Society published an Op-Ed for The Art Newspaper decrying a proposed U.S. Orphan Works law which "remove[s] the penalty for copyright infringement if the creator of a work, after a diligent search, cannot be located."

In the Op-Ed, Stella wrote, The Copyright Office presumes that the infringers it would let off the hook would be those who had made a "good faith, reasonably diligent" search for the copyright holder. Unfortunately, it is totally up to the infringer to decide if he has made a good faith search. Bad faith can be shown only if a rights holder finds out about the infringement and then goes to federal court to determine whether the infringer has failed to conduct an adequate search. Few artists can afford the costs of federal litigation: attorneys’ fees in our country vastly exceed the licensing fee for a typical painting or drawing. The Copyright Office proposal would have a disproportionately negative, even catastrophic, impact on the ability of painters and illustrators to make a living from selling copies of their work... It is deeply troubling that government should be considering taking away their principal means of making ends meet—their copyrights.

Exhibitions Stella’s work was included in several important exhibitions that defined 1960s art[citation needed], among them the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s The Shaped Canvas (1965) and Systemic Painting (1966). The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Stella’s work in 1970.His art has since been the subject of several retrospectives in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 2012, a retrospective of Stella's career was shown at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.

Awards: $2000 in cash awards will be given during Art Fest on the Green. Best in Show $700 1st Place $500 2nd Place $300 3rd Place $200 3 Honorable Mentions $100 each Categories: Drawings Paintings Photography Printmaking Mixed-media Ceramics Fiber Furniture Glass Jewelry Metal Wood

For more information: www.wellingtonartsociety.org Leslie Pfeiffer, mysticway1@bellsouth.net Toni Willey, tgwilleyart@gmail.com 18

Ghahvakhaneh art style is an Iranian style of art. This painting is a colorful oil painting with martial, religious, and celebration themes culminating in the late Qajar and early Pahlavi times of the Iranian constitutional movement of the Mashroote it rose to popularity. Significant examples of the works of the painters are kept at Reza Abbasi Museum. It’s background goes back to storytelling and stories of Shahnameh and telling stories about karbala.

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