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Descriptif du lot
“For me everything connects with the hexagon.” —Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian
(H. Ulrich Obrist and K. Marta (eds.), Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Cosmic Geometry, Bologna & Dubai 2011).
Commissioned for the opening of the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2006, Variations on the Hexagon belongs to one of the most significant projects of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s mature career. Created in her studio in Tehran as an installation of six monumental panels, the commission brought the artist’s contemporary practice into direct dialogue with the historical traditions represented within the museum’s Islamic collection. At its centre lies the hexagon, a form to which Farmanfarmaian returned throughout her career and whose potential for repetition, subdivision and seemingly infinite permutation provided the underlying structure for some of her most complex works. Through mirror mosaic, coloured and reverse-painted glass, and geometric construction, she transformed a vocabulary rooted in Iranian architecture and decorative arts into a distinctly contemporary investigation of abstraction, light and perception.
The present work is one of the six panels that originally formed this installation. Nearly six feet high, its composition is governed by a rigorous geometric logic. Interlocking hexagons occupy its centre, contained within a larger framework from which lines extend towards the edges of the panel. These primary forms are progressively subdivided and repeated, creating a complex network of geometric relationships across the surface. Yet the mathematical precision of the composition is continually animated by variations in pattern, material and reflection. From an elementary geometric vocabulary, Farmanfarmaian thus generates a surface of remarkable visual complexity.
The primary technique employed in the present work is āyeneh-kāri, or mirror mosaic, in which pieces of silvered glass are cut into predetermined shapes and set within a plaster matrix to create intricate patterned surfaces. The technique has been practiced in Iran since silvered glass mirrors were first imported during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, eventually becoming an important feature of the country’s palaces and architectural interiors. Farmanfarmaian began incorporating the technique into her work in the 1970s, collaborating with skilled Iranian craftsmen while fundamentally reconsidering the contexts in which the technique could operate. Rather than reproducing traditional mirror decoration, she combined its craftsmanship with geometric structures drawn from her broader study of Islamic ornament and introduced materials including coloured and reverse-painted glass.
Farmanfarmaian’s decisive encounter with the expressive possibilities of mirror came during a visit to the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz. Its interior, enveloped by innumerable mirrored tesserae, presented an environment in which solid architecture appeared to dissolve into reflected light. She recalled sitting within the shrine and observing visitors and their movements multiplied across its surfaces. What captivated Farmanfarmaian was not simply the splendour of the decoration, but the capacity of mirror to transform a static architectural space through fragmentation, luminosity and movement. This encounter would become fundamental to her development of mirror as an artistic material.
In her own work, Farmanfarmaian liberated āyeneh-kāri from the walls and ceilings it traditionally adorned and transformed it into an autonomous artistic surface. As Frank Stella observed of her achievement, “The real expression of Islamic geometry is its use as architectural surface. But Monir has taken it off the wall and made it into essentially its own surface” (H. Ulrich Obrist and K. Marta (eds.), Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Cosmic Geometry, Bologna & Dubai 2011). Her approach was therefore not imitation. By retaining the technical knowledge of traditional craftsmanship while introducing new compositions, materials and scales, she allowed a centuries-old practice to participate in the language of contemporary abstraction.
The specific choice of the hexagon offered Farmanfarmaian an especially fertile structure through which to pursue this transformation. “For me everything connects with the hexagon”, she explained (H. Ulrich Obrist and K. Marta (eds.), Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Cosmic Geometry, Bologna & Dubai 2011). Within the geometric and Sufi associations that informed her understanding of these forms, she related its six sides to the six spatial directions—forward, backward, right, left, up and down—as well as to six virtues: generosity, self-discipline, patience, determination, insight and compassion. Hexagonal structures recur throughout Islamic geometric ornament, yet Farmanfarmaian was equally fascinated by their generative possibilities. Repetition and subdivision could transform a single elementary shape into an extraordinary variety of configurations, making the hexagon both a symbolic form and a compositional system.
Mirror introduces a further element of instability into this precise structure. Each fragment catches and redirects light, breaking the surrounding environment into shifting planes, while the blue glass and reverse-glass painted elements establish areas of colour and visual density. Although the geometry remains fixed, the appearance of the panel changes according to its surroundings and the position of the viewer. Farmanfarmaian described mirror as a symbol of light and life, explaining that the viewer who encounters their own reflection becomes part of the work. The composition is therefore never entirely self-contained: the architecture around it, changing light and the viewer’s own image are temporarily absorbed into its surface.
Farmanfarmaian’s synthesis of Iranian artistic traditions and twentieth-century abstraction emerged from her own experience between Iran and the United States. Born in Qazvin in 1922, she travelled to New York in the 1940s, studying at Parsons School of Design and encountering an artistic milieu that included Milton Avery and, later, Andy Warhol. Upon returning to Iran in the late 1950s, she travelled extensively throughout the country and immersed herself in its material culture, collecting reverse-glass paintings, Turkmen jewellery, textiles and qahveh-khaneh paintings. Rather than approaching these traditions as fixed historical forms, she examined their techniques, structures and materials as the foundations for a new artistic vocabulary. By the 1970s, geometry and mirror had become central to Farmanfarmaian’s practice. This development was interrupted following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, after which she remained in New York for more than two decades. Her eventual return to Tehran in the early 2000s enabled her once again to collaborate closely with local craftsmen and pursue āyeneh-kāri on an ambitious scale.
Widely celebrated as one of the most influential artists of the Middle East, Farmanfarmaian became the first Iranian artist to receive a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2015). Her works are held in the permanent collections of leading international institutions including Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; M+, Hong Kong and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran.
(H. Ulrich Obrist and K. Marta (eds.), Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Cosmic Geometry, Bologna & Dubai 2011).
Commissioned for the opening of the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2006, Variations on the Hexagon belongs to one of the most significant projects of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s mature career. Created in her studio in Tehran as an installation of six monumental panels, the commission brought the artist’s contemporary practice into direct dialogue with the historical traditions represented within the museum’s Islamic collection. At its centre lies the hexagon, a form to which Farmanfarmaian returned throughout her career and whose potential for repetition, subdivision and seemingly infinite permutation provided the underlying structure for some of her most complex works. Through mirror mosaic, coloured and reverse-painted glass, and geometric construction, she transformed a vocabulary rooted in Iranian architecture and decorative arts into a distinctly contemporary investigation of abstraction, light and perception.
The present work is one of the six panels that originally formed this installation. Nearly six feet high, its composition is governed by a rigorous geometric logic. Interlocking hexagons occupy its centre, contained within a larger framework from which lines extend towards the edges of the panel. These primary forms are progressively subdivided and repeated, creating a complex network of geometric relationships across the surface. Yet the mathematical precision of the composition is continually animated by variations in pattern, material and reflection. From an elementary geometric vocabulary, Farmanfarmaian thus generates a surface of remarkable visual complexity.
The primary technique employed in the present work is āyeneh-kāri, or mirror mosaic, in which pieces of silvered glass are cut into predetermined shapes and set within a plaster matrix to create intricate patterned surfaces. The technique has been practiced in Iran since silvered glass mirrors were first imported during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, eventually becoming an important feature of the country’s palaces and architectural interiors. Farmanfarmaian began incorporating the technique into her work in the 1970s, collaborating with skilled Iranian craftsmen while fundamentally reconsidering the contexts in which the technique could operate. Rather than reproducing traditional mirror decoration, she combined its craftsmanship with geometric structures drawn from her broader study of Islamic ornament and introduced materials including coloured and reverse-painted glass.
Farmanfarmaian’s decisive encounter with the expressive possibilities of mirror came during a visit to the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz. Its interior, enveloped by innumerable mirrored tesserae, presented an environment in which solid architecture appeared to dissolve into reflected light. She recalled sitting within the shrine and observing visitors and their movements multiplied across its surfaces. What captivated Farmanfarmaian was not simply the splendour of the decoration, but the capacity of mirror to transform a static architectural space through fragmentation, luminosity and movement. This encounter would become fundamental to her development of mirror as an artistic material.
In her own work, Farmanfarmaian liberated āyeneh-kāri from the walls and ceilings it traditionally adorned and transformed it into an autonomous artistic surface. As Frank Stella observed of her achievement, “The real expression of Islamic geometry is its use as architectural surface. But Monir has taken it off the wall and made it into essentially its own surface” (H. Ulrich Obrist and K. Marta (eds.), Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Cosmic Geometry, Bologna & Dubai 2011). Her approach was therefore not imitation. By retaining the technical knowledge of traditional craftsmanship while introducing new compositions, materials and scales, she allowed a centuries-old practice to participate in the language of contemporary abstraction.
The specific choice of the hexagon offered Farmanfarmaian an especially fertile structure through which to pursue this transformation. “For me everything connects with the hexagon”, she explained (H. Ulrich Obrist and K. Marta (eds.), Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Cosmic Geometry, Bologna & Dubai 2011). Within the geometric and Sufi associations that informed her understanding of these forms, she related its six sides to the six spatial directions—forward, backward, right, left, up and down—as well as to six virtues: generosity, self-discipline, patience, determination, insight and compassion. Hexagonal structures recur throughout Islamic geometric ornament, yet Farmanfarmaian was equally fascinated by their generative possibilities. Repetition and subdivision could transform a single elementary shape into an extraordinary variety of configurations, making the hexagon both a symbolic form and a compositional system.
Mirror introduces a further element of instability into this precise structure. Each fragment catches and redirects light, breaking the surrounding environment into shifting planes, while the blue glass and reverse-glass painted elements establish areas of colour and visual density. Although the geometry remains fixed, the appearance of the panel changes according to its surroundings and the position of the viewer. Farmanfarmaian described mirror as a symbol of light and life, explaining that the viewer who encounters their own reflection becomes part of the work. The composition is therefore never entirely self-contained: the architecture around it, changing light and the viewer’s own image are temporarily absorbed into its surface.
Farmanfarmaian’s synthesis of Iranian artistic traditions and twentieth-century abstraction emerged from her own experience between Iran and the United States. Born in Qazvin in 1922, she travelled to New York in the 1940s, studying at Parsons School of Design and encountering an artistic milieu that included Milton Avery and, later, Andy Warhol. Upon returning to Iran in the late 1950s, she travelled extensively throughout the country and immersed herself in its material culture, collecting reverse-glass paintings, Turkmen jewellery, textiles and qahveh-khaneh paintings. Rather than approaching these traditions as fixed historical forms, she examined their techniques, structures and materials as the foundations for a new artistic vocabulary. By the 1970s, geometry and mirror had become central to Farmanfarmaian’s practice. This development was interrupted following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, after which she remained in New York for more than two decades. Her eventual return to Tehran in the early 2000s enabled her once again to collaborate closely with local craftsmen and pursue āyeneh-kāri on an ambitious scale.
Widely celebrated as one of the most influential artists of the Middle East, Farmanfarmaian became the first Iranian artist to receive a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2015). Her works are held in the permanent collections of leading international institutions including Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; M+, Hong Kong and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran.