Oh, what a tangled web, part too-many-to-count: Long-time readers (all three of you) may remember reading here about my admiration for the work of the Iranian artist Farah Ossouli. The Metropolitan Museum's Timeline of Art History includes this passage regarding her painting in its section on "Modern and Contemporary Art in Iran":
The late 1990s has witnessed a spurt of artistic activity, with many artists like Farah Ossuli (born 1953) working in Iran now. She has chosen the medium of Persian miniature painting as the point of departure for her art. In her paintings, Ossuli replaces the spaces for text with fields of color and manipulates the scale of the figures, many of which are women. She appropriates the language of miniature painting, yet re-presents it in a contemporary idiom. Ossuli says the following about her work: "Miniaturists say that being a contemporary miniaturist means being a magician, someone who can do incredible things, be rigorous, work five years on a painting, or be able to draw a line that is invisible. But I want to make visible that which is unsaid, and I take only a reasonable pain in creating my works. So, I am definitely not a miniaturist."
She's also a member of the Dena art group of Iranian women artists. I've never had the pleasure of seeing her work in person, but have periodically searched across the net, trying to find new images of and information about it. So you can imagine my surprise and delight to find an email from the artist herself in my mailbox this past week, sending me word that she now has a website of her own at FarahOssouli.com. This is very cool, and I'm happy to see it, along with all of the writing, information on exhibitions, and--especially--images. Given the state of the world today, it may be as close as I get to seeing her complex, poised paintings. So I'll be reading and looking, and hoping that events prove otherwise. Take a look.
This sounded familiar somehow, but it turned out I was remembering it wrongly: not the artist in question, but Ambreen Butt. Anyway, linked for your pleasure.
Posted by: Franklin | January 04, 2007 at 03:16 PM
She's also good, though rather different in style.
Posted by: JL | January 04, 2007 at 03:34 PM