In Memory of Sadegh Hedayat

The present work is a rare figurative work of the artist from 1969 during his time in Paris depicting Sadegh Hedayat, a prominent and international known French – Iranian intellectual, writer and translator best known for his novel The Blind Owl. Hedayat's novels in general were prized by many writers including Henry Miller and André Breton, among others. In 1987 Raul Ruiz made a feature film “La Chouette Aveugle (The Blind Owl)" in France based off of Hedayat’s novel The Blind Owl, its formal innovation led critics and filmmakers to declare the film French cinema’s most beautiful jewel of the past decade. Hedayat committed suicide at the age of 48 in his apartment is Paris in 1951 which the artist chooses to depict in the present work. It was during this year in 1969 that Sepehri visited Père Lachaise Cemetery to visit Hedayat's place of burial. Sepehri chooses to depict this tumultuous time for Hedayat preceding his death; we see he reaches a dead end in life, literally as he approaches a dead end road. His back is towards us and we are faced instead to a garbage can and water pump. While uncommon for Sepehri to depict figures such as these, he continues to paint his much acclaimed subject, that of trees and nature and experiments with perspective, as seen in the present composition.