SIGNED KAMIL, OTTOMAN TURKEY, 19TH CENTURY

Composed of three letters, the single world heech in Farsi means ‘nothing’. It renders in a single word the view of pious Muslims, as well as the Iranian Sufi and its greatest exponent, Rumi, the mystical belief that recognizes that God is permanent, while everything else has no true substance, bound to vanish. The Persian artist Parviz Tanavoli (b.1937) has recently taken the word heech as the subject for a series of sculptures. For Tanavoli word is synonymous with creativity itself – the void filled by the artist’s imagination. A number of Heech sculptures by Tanavoli have sold Christie’s, Dubai. See for example 1 February 2007, lot 311.