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Lot Essay
While Marcos Grigorian’s Abgousht Dizi and bread series are well-known Pop art installations depicting everyday subjects such as half-eaten meals or various Iranian breads, in the present work from the Pistachio series, the pistachios present a distinct notion. Since the 1960s and 1970s up until today, when Iran was a favoured tourist destination, pistachios have become a popular souvenir, as well as a traditional gift that Iranians over on special occasions and festivities. To attract consumers, specifically foreign tourists, nut sellers always innovatively experimented with packaging and shop windows were intricately decorated with an attractive diversity of pistachio packages, making pistachios, a popular consumer product found on any Tehran market shelf.
Having always been fascinated with earth as a basic material to execute artworks, Marcus Grigorian created various series of minimalist works using kahgel (Dirt). This mixture of mud and straw, once used as a cheap building material in rustic cottages, was swiftly replaced by modern construction materials. The artist fashioned works presenting simple objects from his surroundings, and subsequently installed them on surfaces covered with kahgel. His compositions are an intimate connection to the life in the Iranian villages and salute to the basic simple use of materials found in that land. The surface of his oeuvre is his land in its primitive form, using this as a way to delete all materialism accumulated over the years.
In his Pistachio series, Iranian-Armenian modernist Grigorian fixed pistachios on a typical minimalistic base made of mud and straw. To complete his composition, he added two intertwining rings of brown paint around the pistachios. Applying the same colour and texture to the background, as well as on the embossed rectangular that frames the subject, this particular minimalistic piece has been labeled as his inspirational work, due to its symmetry and harmony in colours. Its soothing simplicity, coupled with its traditional symbolic value, represents a thriving time period in Iranian history that induces nostalgia to the viewer.
Having always been fascinated with earth as a basic material to execute artworks, Marcus Grigorian created various series of minimalist works using kahgel (Dirt). This mixture of mud and straw, once used as a cheap building material in rustic cottages, was swiftly replaced by modern construction materials. The artist fashioned works presenting simple objects from his surroundings, and subsequently installed them on surfaces covered with kahgel. His compositions are an intimate connection to the life in the Iranian villages and salute to the basic simple use of materials found in that land. The surface of his oeuvre is his land in its primitive form, using this as a way to delete all materialism accumulated over the years.
In his Pistachio series, Iranian-Armenian modernist Grigorian fixed pistachios on a typical minimalistic base made of mud and straw. To complete his composition, he added two intertwining rings of brown paint around the pistachios. Applying the same colour and texture to the background, as well as on the embossed rectangular that frames the subject, this particular minimalistic piece has been labeled as his inspirational work, due to its symmetry and harmony in colours. Its soothing simplicity, coupled with its traditional symbolic value, represents a thriving time period in Iranian history that induces nostalgia to the viewer.