Farideh Lashai Iranian, 1944-2013
Untitled, 1994
Oil, graphite and oil pastel on canvas
70 x 90 cm
27 1/2 x 35 1/2 in
27 1/2 x 35 1/2 in
Created in 1994, this painting belongs to a pivotal moment in Farideh Lashai’s practice, shaped by experiences of war, illness, loss, migration, and return. Emerging after the Iran Iraq War,...
Created in 1994, this painting belongs to a pivotal moment in Farideh Lashai’s practice, shaped by experiences of war, illness, loss, migration, and return. Emerging after the Iran Iraq War, the death of her mother, her first encounter with cancer, and years marked by political and social upheaval in Iran, the work reflects what remained central to Lashai’s practice throughout her life: painting as a direct and visceral register of inner experience.
The composition gathers around a dark, unstable central mass that appears at once to form and disintegrate. Black and violet passages accumulate densely across the surface, interrupted by flashes of ochre, green, and electric blue. Sweeping gestural lines move rapidly across the canvas with a palpable sense of speed and force. Lashai’s brushwork carries extraordinary velocity. Lines slash, scrape, and accelerate through the composition, creating a feeling of movement that is both physical and emotional. At moments they evoke violent weather, currents of water, or debris carried by wind; elsewhere they resemble fractures, scars, or nervous traces of thought.
Thin linear gestures cut across heavier accumulations of pigment, producing tension between density and dispersal, weight and air. The blue arrows, drawn almost like directional markings, intensify the sensation of invisible forces moving through the painting. Nothing fully settles. The image remains suspended between landscape, storm, ruin, and psychic state.
The work is rooted in a verse by Hafez:
“We are the shipwrecked ones:O favoring breeze, arise;Perhaps I may once againSee the face of the Friend.”
کشتی شکستگانیم ای بادِ شُرطِه برخیزباشد که باز بینم دیدارِ آشنا را
Rather than illustrating the poem, Lashai absorbs its atmosphere and emotional tension into the language of paint. The painting carries the condition of the “shipwrecked ones” within its structure: fragmentation, turbulence, and the search for direction amid collapse. The sweeping brushwork recalls the force of the “favoring breeze,” while fleeting openings within the darkness suggest the distant possibility of return, recognition, or reunion.
As throughout Lashai’s work, abstraction becomes a way of holding together contradictory states: violence and tenderness, despair and endurance, fragmentation and movement toward light. The painting remains unresolved, carried forward by its own restless energy.
The composition gathers around a dark, unstable central mass that appears at once to form and disintegrate. Black and violet passages accumulate densely across the surface, interrupted by flashes of ochre, green, and electric blue. Sweeping gestural lines move rapidly across the canvas with a palpable sense of speed and force. Lashai’s brushwork carries extraordinary velocity. Lines slash, scrape, and accelerate through the composition, creating a feeling of movement that is both physical and emotional. At moments they evoke violent weather, currents of water, or debris carried by wind; elsewhere they resemble fractures, scars, or nervous traces of thought.
Thin linear gestures cut across heavier accumulations of pigment, producing tension between density and dispersal, weight and air. The blue arrows, drawn almost like directional markings, intensify the sensation of invisible forces moving through the painting. Nothing fully settles. The image remains suspended between landscape, storm, ruin, and psychic state.
The work is rooted in a verse by Hafez:
“We are the shipwrecked ones:O favoring breeze, arise;Perhaps I may once againSee the face of the Friend.”
کشتی شکستگانیم ای بادِ شُرطِه برخیزباشد که باز بینم دیدارِ آشنا را
Rather than illustrating the poem, Lashai absorbs its atmosphere and emotional tension into the language of paint. The painting carries the condition of the “shipwrecked ones” within its structure: fragmentation, turbulence, and the search for direction amid collapse. The sweeping brushwork recalls the force of the “favoring breeze,” while fleeting openings within the darkness suggest the distant possibility of return, recognition, or reunion.
As throughout Lashai’s work, abstraction becomes a way of holding together contradictory states: violence and tenderness, despair and endurance, fragmentation and movement toward light. The painting remains unresolved, carried forward by its own restless energy.