.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The intensely pictorial character Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi imbues in his 1980s New York works resonates powerfully within this memorizing painting titled ALMAAK. Flamboyantly and masterfully, Zenderoudi has translated here his sculptural conceptions into the field we know as painting. ALMAAK might be seen as a manifesto; it celebrates the themes of diffraction, radiance, reflection and iridescence, all core to the artist’s philosophy and practice. Radical and simple, this work boasts a colorful geometric arrangement of its contents, seemingly floating upon an alluring blue ground the artist has decorated with elegantly dissipated gestural application. The work embraces controlled movement and tension. Works of this type, depicting the tondo and Quadratura circuli (a circle within a square), are landmark within Zenderoudi’s output. Notable examples of this sort reside within the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s collection (VAV+HWE) and at the Centre POMPIDOU in Paris (MIUZ SKFE). ALMAAK dematerialises the pictorial artefact with an invasion of light and propels the viewer into the space of stellar kinematics.
Born in Tehran in 1937, Zenderoudi worked in his native city before rising to prominence on the global stage in the early 1960’s. As a young artist, he gained fame in Iran as the founding member of the Saqqakhaneh movement, in which he explored under the influence of the international Fluxus movement, the visual elements of the ordinary Persian life such as popular icons, codes of representation and the numerous forms of the writing expression. By his artistic innovations, Zenderoudi has influenced generations of artists in his path. Moving to Paris in 1961—then twenty-four years old—he immediately became a celebrated artist and would be selected as one of the top ten most important living artists in the world in a 1972 survey by influential international curators. Until now, Zenderoudi is attached to developing polyform artworks bypassing formal conventions.
Zenderoudi’s work has received awards from the Venice, Sao Paolo and the Paris Biennials and has been acquired by major private collections and international institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The British Museum in London and The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
Born in Tehran in 1937, Zenderoudi worked in his native city before rising to prominence on the global stage in the early 1960’s. As a young artist, he gained fame in Iran as the founding member of the Saqqakhaneh movement, in which he explored under the influence of the international Fluxus movement, the visual elements of the ordinary Persian life such as popular icons, codes of representation and the numerous forms of the writing expression. By his artistic innovations, Zenderoudi has influenced generations of artists in his path. Moving to Paris in 1961—then twenty-four years old—he immediately became a celebrated artist and would be selected as one of the top ten most important living artists in the world in a 1972 survey by influential international curators. Until now, Zenderoudi is attached to developing polyform artworks bypassing formal conventions.
Zenderoudi’s work has received awards from the Venice, Sao Paolo and the Paris Biennials and has been acquired by major private collections and international institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The British Museum in London and The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.