farhad moshiri artnet - static.perrotin.com
TRANSCRIPT
PRESSBOOK
Farhad MOSHIRI
Artnet
December 2017
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01/12/2017 How Farhad Moshiri Turned a Wintry Patch of Cherry Trees Into a Moving Meditation on Life in Tehran
How Farhad Moshiri Transformed a Wintry Patch of CherryTrees Into a Moving Meditation on Life in Tehran
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01/12/2017 How Farhad Moshiri Turned a Wintry Patch of Cherry Trees Into a Moving Meditation on Life in Tehran
Walk into Perrotin Gallery’s New York outpost these days and you might imagine that someone hit a seasonal fastforward button: the walls are hung with stark, blackandwhite pictures of tree branches blanketed in freshlyfallensnow. Called “Snow Forest,” it’s Farhad Moshiri’s fifth show with the gallery, and it’s a welcome departure for theartist. While the works are rendered with his signature style of handembroidered beads on canvas, the seriesnonetheless shows the Iranian artist making a dramatic break with the Popartinspired rhetoric for which he’sbecome well known, retreating into more contemplative depictions of nature.
The winter imagery also does evoke a number of arthistorical references, however, most notably a series of austerewinter photographs that Moshiri’s famed countryman the artistfilmmaker Abbas Kiarostam made after the onset ofthe Iranian revolution. However, the source material of Moshiri’s work has its own backstory: the series is derivedfrom a handful of photos the artist shot outside own his house in Tehran, the morning after a snow storm. Below,Moshiri explains to artnet News in his own words the significance of the winter imagery, and why he was compelledto make embroideries from it.
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Farhad Moshiri. Courtesy of Perrotin.
One winter day in the year 2015, I woke up to find everything under a threeinch blanket of fresh snow.
Nothing is more refreshing than a walk in that weather. I grabbed my camera and went outside quickly, because Itend to lose interest when the snow starts to melt off the branches.
My wife and I have been living in the outskirts of Tehran, where one gets less pollution and more trees—cherrytrees, in our case. We bought the land and had to chop down some trees to make space for a home/studio, but weplanted many more afterwards, mainly cherry trees. The area we live in is known for its cherry orchards, and I havebeen photographing the blossoms as they appear for a very short period every year.
As mesmerized as I become by their beauty, I have never given myself the green light to make one into a painting orembroidery because a cherry blossom is a cherry blossom no matter how you look at it, period. Wait two weeks andyou get beautiful red cherries on the entire tree, another heavenly sight to behold, but still I’m confronted with thesame problem: I can’t paint cherries unless I simply want to paint cherries, which I don’t want to do.
01/12/2017 How Farhad Moshiri Turned a Wintry Patch of Cherry Trees Into a Moving Meditation on Life in Tehran
A view Farhad Moshiri’s “Snow Forest” at Perrotin, New York, 2017. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of Perrotin.
When winter arrives and every single wet branch is covered by a layer of snow, something intriguing happens.Suddenly I no longer look at the trees as trees. They become curious abstractions, complex compositions, acalligraphy rendered by nature, a Jackson Pollock/Santa Claus collaboration. If the sky happens to be cloudy thephotographs will look practically highcontrast in black and white. It is actually one of the rare moments that theweather renders nature in black and white.
When I was in high school, in Idyllwild, California, we used to get five months of heavy snow. I took a photographyclass then. Every student had a plethora of photos of white hills with black twigs sticking out of them, or a lonely treesitting in a snowcovered valley. There was also a monthly photography magazine that regularly featured “poetic”winter photography. In other words, people have always loved to take photographs in snow, and always will.
Many artists have done amazing blackandwhite abstract compositions. For me, this was a personal experience.When I was out there trying to capture that special shot, it felt like nothing else mattered except that moment, andwhen I look at the finished work I figure that all I wanted to say was this: ‘I was there when all of this happened, andit was right outside my doorstep.’”
—Farhad Moshiri, 2017
01/12/2017 How Farhad Moshiri Turned a Wintry Patch of Cherry Trees Into a Moving Meditation on Life in Tehran
View of the exhibition Farhad Moshiri “Snow Forest” at Perrotin, New York, 2017. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy ofPerrotin.
“Snow Forest” is on view at Perrotin through December 23, 2017. “Go West,” the Iranian artist’s first U.S.retrospective, is on view at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh through January 14, 2018.