Sadr Behjat (Iran 1924-2009)

Untitled Oil on paper pasted on wood 68.5 x 100 cm circa 1665 signed lower middle "Sadr". A certificate from Mrs. Mitra Goberville, the artist's daughter, will be given to the buyer. This work is listed in the catalog raisonné under number 448. Considered one of the pioneers of Iranian abstraction, Behdjat Sadr studied for the first part of her career at the Tehran School of Fine Arts and then went to Rome where she turned to non-geometric abstract painting. After her studies, and upon her return to Tehran, she chose to place various painting media (canvas, paper, cardboard, aluminum and glass) on the floor of her studio and began to manipulate line and color with a palette knife. Black oil paint predominates. "If the black, present in many of his paintings, represents oil," wrote curator Fabrice Hergott, "it symbolizes the immense task, the indelible oil slick like a gob that this oil represents in the history of Iran, through which this country has been restored to the rank of producer, arousing the lust and darkest passions of the human soul." The work we present depicts the characteristic and fundamental features of her work where she abandons the traditional frame and colors to seize the synthetic paints used in the building that she pours on supports arranged on the floor. She then proceeds by remodeling the material with a large spatula, thus producing traces, in negative, of her own gestures. Behjat Sadr has presented her work in numerous institutions in France and abroad, including: the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1963, then in 2014; The Gray Foundation, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, 1971; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 1972; the Centre d'art Le Noroît, Arras, 1985; the Grey Art Gallery, New York, 2010; Asia Society, New York, 2013- 2014, and MAXXI Rome, 2015. She also participated in the Venice Biennale in 1962. In 2004, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran dedicated a major retrospective to her as part of exhibitions dedicated to the pioneers of modern art in Iran. "Today, I have really understood what I want. I want there to be in the history of world art, in the history of world painters, the name of at least one woman. Then she adds: "I am ready to put everything I have, my comfort, my happiness, all of this in addition..." Sadr, March 1957