Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam | "Articulated Sculptures": Dastan's Basement

Dastan’s Basement is proud to announce the opening of Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam’s solo exhibition titled “Articulated Sculptures” on October 10, 2025. The exhibition will be on view through October 31.

 

As the title suggests, the exhibition presents a selection of works from the artist’s “Articulated Sculptures” series. Alongside five Plexiglass sculptures, two prints from the “Fear and Flight” series will also be on display. The “Articulated Sculptures” series spans a long period of Vaziri Moghaddam’s artistic practice from 1969 to 1974 and again from 2016 to 2018. He created these kinetic sculptures in a variety of materials — such as wood and Plexiglass — and in diverse scales.The creation process of this collection, much like "Sand Paintings" of the artist, began with a simple incident. The late Vaziri Moghaddam recounts this event with pleasant sweetness in his autobiography: "One day, to avoid poking a hole through my work table, I placed several sheets of wood under the piece that I wanted to drill. The pressure of the drill poked holes through the sheets of wood and made them rotate around the bit. A thought sparked: such a movable form can be incorporated into the work; in other words, if I drilled a hole through the sheets and put a rod through them I could create a kinetic form." Vaziri Moghaddam, following in the footsteps of artists such as Calder and Tinguely but with a distinct approach, made the movement of his sculptures possible – not through wind or motors, but by the force of the viewer’s hand, thus emphasizing the human and interactive aspect of his works.

 

Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam (1924 - 2018) openned new vistas in the world of contemporary Iranian art. Studying art in Europe together with his inquisitive and experiential spirit introduced him to a variety of art forms and techniques. As a university professor in Iran, he paved the way for many to-be artists to go beyond the limits of established ways. His "Drawing Method and Painting Guide" (1981) remains a standard academic text today. 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 reliefs of his later years. Vaziri's work is characterized by a restless experimentation with forms and materials – deployed in his drawings, sand paintings, opto-kinetic sculptures, and painted aluminum wall reliefs.