Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam : Art Basel Hong Kong 2024

Dastan is pleased to announce its participation at Art Basel Hong Kong 2024. At Booth 3D25, Insights Sector, Dastan features a solo presentation of works by the late artist Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam (1924 – 2018). This marks Dastan’s second presence at the fair. The year 2024 marks one hundred years since the artist's birth. Fondazione Vaziri Moghaddam has programmed numerous international events and exhibitions titled Centenary Project in collaboration with several institutions and galleries, including Dastan. Art Basel Hong Kong will be open to public viewing from March 28 to 30, 2024, at the Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre. 

 

The presentation brings together several of Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam’s paintings engulfing a larger sculpture, aiming to present a panoramic view into the artist’s expansive vision and universe. 

Untitled (2016), a large 2 x 6m painting from the artist’s Sand Compositions series, will be displayed for the first time, along with several limited-edition prints in Dastan’s booth showroom. His sand paintings imagine an alternative tactile materiality on the surface. These paintings were conceived in a playful moment in the spring of 1959, and Vaziri kept trying his hand at them for the following three years until 1963. Different types of sand were applied to the canvas in their natural state or mixed with color. 

The booth also features a sculpture, Pardiss, from his articulated sculptures series. These works seem to escape the confines of their layers and borders. They were conceived in 1968 upon his return to Iran from Europe. They were designed as open and interactive artworks encouraging the viewer’s participation.

“These sculptures possess elongated, serrated wooden parts attached to their middle bases through joints that could be manipulated and moved. In Vaziri’s words, ‘They would open and close just like human joints.’ According to the artist, the idea of these moving parts occurred while making and cutting pieces for the fixed sculptures. These earlier immobile sculptures were devised by intersecting a few shaped, colorful, flat plates, like fragments of a painting.*” 

Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam’s metaphorical approach to expressing ‘tactility’ through his playful renditions of geometric forms and abstractions is one of the most prominent aspects of his work. In creating limits and edges, the artist invoked musicality and rhythm to inspire a sense of movement in the forms and, in his words, “free them.” 

In his work, he imagines such movements and dynamism in sculptural pieces in light of his fascination with structural space. The pieces are expressed in relational motion, both within the space that they are presented in and relative to how they are viewed. Using different materials, the artist simultaneously induced transparency, rigidity, movement, ephemerality, timelessness, liquidity, and solidity. 

 

Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam (1924 – 2018) is acknowledged as a pioneer of Iranian abstractionism and a leading figure in developing modernist approaches and contemporary Iranian art. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. He was also an educator, opening the way for many to-be artists to go beyond the limits of established ways. His "Drawing Method and Painting Guide" (1981) is today's standard academic text. 

He is widely recognized for works spanning five decades, from the painterly abstracts of the 1960s to the hard-edged geometry of the sculpted and painted aluminum wall. Vaziri’s work is characterized by a restless experimentation of form through materials deployed in his drawings, sand paintings, optokinetic sculptures, and painted aluminum wall reliefs. 

Vaziri Moghaddam’s work was presented at the Venice Biennial several times over his lifetime and acquired by prestigious institutions and collections such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA).

* Darabi, Helia. “Between Two Paradigms: Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam’s Art”. In “Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam Unrealised Projects”. Exhibition Catalog. 2021. Pejman Foundation. Tehran, Iran