Behjat Sadr
Painter
Artworks
Biography
1924-2009
Behjat Sadr: Trace through the Black explores her artistic and intellectual heritage, with archival material alongside, and presenting a rare selection of masterpieces from her early debate with “abstraction informelle” in the 1950s, to her experimentations around organic forms, trace making and hallucinatory networks of lines throughout the 1960s and 1970s, up until her “collage” years throughout the (inner) exile and the irrepressible return to her world of futuristic nostalgia.
Sadr is regarded as one of Iran's most influential and radical Modern painters, due to her abstract paintings of paradoxical traces that blend luxuriant nature with the sharp-edged industrial. Sadr developed this signatory language in the 1950's, bringing together European Modernism and a modernity in Iran. Her paintings obsessively try to overcome the boundaries separating the abstract and the figurative, resulting in explorations of material and texture. A pioneer of the visual arts in Iran, she was one of the first women artists and professors to appear on the international biennials scene in the early 1960s. Sadr offers the singular testimony of a nascent cosmopolitan modernity.
Behjat Sadr: Trace through the Black explores her artistic and intellectual heritage, with archival material alongside, and presenting a rare selection of masterpieces from her early debate with “abstraction informelle” in the 1950s, to her experimentations around organic forms, trace making and hallucinatory networks of lines throughout the 1960s and 1970s, up until her “collage” years throughout the (inner) exile and the irrepressible return to her world of futuristic nostalgia.
Sadr is regarded as one of Iran's most influential and radical Modern painters, due to her abstract paintings of paradoxical traces that blend luxuriant nature with the sharp-edged industrial. Sadr developed this signatory language in the 1950's, bringing together European Modernism and a modernity in Iran. Her paintings obsessively try to overcome the boundaries separating the abstract and the figurative, resulting in explorations of material and texture. A pioneer of the visual arts in Iran, she was one of the first women artists and professors to appear on the international biennials scene in the early 1960s. Sadr offers the singular testimony of a nascent cosmopolitan modernity.