Miniature Series, The Persian Serenade

It is often said that Derakshani treats his canvases like a performative construction, bringing together his passion for music with his love for art and history. Christie’s is offering two works that represent two very distinct styles of the artists and exploration into abstraction and figuration, as he investigates subject matter from the King and Queen, Persian miniatures and fig trees. Both works not only hint at the richness of his heritage, but illuminate his technique as he skillfully composes contrasting sensations of luminosity and movement with the use of a pallet knife. Both synonymous with Derakshani’s bold use of colour and dynamic brush strokes, they represent different facets of the artist’s own fusion between Eastern and artistic traditions and contemporary art movements of the West.

Derakshani’s Miniatures series, derived from Persian miniature paintings, are taken from figures and objects rich with his country's traiditonal painting style of celebratory moments. Hidden beneath these layers of paint is a scene both distorted but peeping out of the fragments of architecture blurred by the dynamic, gestural and carefully applied paint. We notice a horseman on the far left and a domed structure. The melodic eruption of dark blue hues and calm greens in vertical symmetry depicts a highly abstracted landscape with a carefully constructed pattern, dripping with a sense of movement.

Beginning his ongoing ‘Hunting’ series since 2007, of which the second work belongs to, the artist has continued to experiment in texture and colour, producing a distinctly precise figurative forms superimposed against an Abstract Expressionist background, bearing inspiration from his time living in New York in the 1980s and his involvement in the Neo-Abstraction movement. The depicted figures are riding horses or hunting against an enchanting red background composed of thick brushstrokes and lacquered surface and they appear to be moving from the darkness to the light. Red is found to be the most strongest hue for the artist for its vibrancy. The result is an elegant composition portraying a harmonious and almost mystical scene of life. The motif of horse-riding is repeated throughout, reminiscent of prehistoric cave paintings and found on the ancient Persian manuscript painting depicting the Royal Court of the Iranian Shah, depicting stories of Bahram Gur, or the Sassanian King Bahram V, who ruled from 420 to 438CE.

Derakshani describes his nomadic early existence, growing up in ‘a great black tent on the top of a mountain, among horses and fields of blue and yellow flowers.’ He talks poetically about watching moonlight, which passed through holes in his tent canvas to create ‘constellations’. Having received his first commission at the young age of nine and having his first solo show at the renowned Ghandriz Art Gallery in Tehran at the age of nineteen, Derakshani was considered a wunderkind. After graduating from the University of Tehran in 1976, Reza went on to study at the Pasadena School of Art in California. Upon finishing his degree in California, he returned to Tehran to teach at its University in the School of Decorative Arts. However, his stay in Iran was short-lived as he left for New York following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, where he found his permanent home for the next sixteen years before moving to Italy.