Ollin

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

BehindGlass
BehindGlass
Convertible
Convertible
Geometric
Geometric
MirrorFamily
MirrorFamily

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (Qazvin, 1922 to Tehran, 2019) made mirror mosaic into modern sculpture. She studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Tehran, sailed for New York in 1945, and studied at Cornell, at Parsons, and at the Art Students League while she worked as a fashion illustrator. In those years she knew the painters of the New York School. She went home to Iran in 1957, won a gold medal in Iran's pavilion at the 1958 Venice Biennale, and spent the next years traveling the country and collecting what it made by hand: Turkmen jewelry, coffeehouse paintings, and the flowers and birds of old paintings on the back of glass.

In 1966 she took two American artist friends to the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz, whose walls and domes are lined with cut mirror. "The very space seemed on fire," she wrote later, with the lamps multiplied in every piece, and "I imagined myself standing inside a many-faceted diamond and looking out at the sun." Mirror mosaic, āina-kāri, was a craft of architectural decoration, passed from father to son and kept for men. She learned it with the master craftsman Hajj Ostad Mohammad Navid, who became her teacher and collaborator. In her studio, craftsmen cut the mirror into strips and small shapes and set them in plaster on wood beside pieces of reverse-painted glass, to designs she drew and calculated.

The 1979 revolution began while she was visiting New York, and it kept her there for most of the next twenty-five years. Without the thin mirror or the craftsmen, she drew, took commissions, and designed textiles. In 2004 she reopened her studio in Tehran, and her most ambitious work followed: the geometric Families, the Convertibles whose pieces can be hung in many arrangements, and the Mazes. The retrospective Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014 opened at the Serralves Museum in Porto in 2014 and at the Guggenheim in New York in 2015. The Monir Museum, which holds 51 works she gave to the University of Tehran, opened in the Negarestan Garden in 2017. It was the first museum in Iran given to a woman artist's work.

"Nothing is done spontaneously; it is all a calculation of geometry and design," she said. She described every polygon she used as a circle divided into equal arcs: three arcs give a triangle, four a square, and so on up to the twelve-sided dodecagon. She gave each number its meaning (the pentagon's five sides are the five senses, the hexagon's six the directions), and she came back most often to the hexagon: "All the mosques in Iran, with all the flowers and the leaves and curves and so on, are based on hexagons."

She belongs in this set because a rule decides every piece of her work: the circle, the number of arcs, and what that number means. A sketch works from the same kind of rule, and a renderer that traces reflections can show what a relief of tilted mirror does with the room around it.

Learn more:

Recreations here

  • MirrorFamily: after the Families (2010 to 2016), with the facets after Untitled Heptagon 11 (2016). Each member of a family is a polygon cut from the circle by her rule, and the family runs from the triangle to the decagon. Inside the outline, every side's triangle is cut into rows of small triangles, and each small triangle is a piece of mirror set in plaster. Every third point of that lattice is pressed up, so every piece tilts and each raised point becomes a six-sided star of mirror. Some stars are painted glass instead, arranged as a star with one point for each side. The pieces are set from the center out, and then a lamp moves in front of the finished relief. The reflections are traced against a real room: a pale ceiling hung with lamps, a dark floor, a doorway. firstSides picks the first member, rings how finely each side is cut, pace how many pieces go in a second, and hold how long the finished relief hangs. An original Ollin interpretation written from the works and from her own account of the geometry.
  swift run Example-Recreations-MonirFarmanfarmaian-MirrorFamily

The relief back as meshes, one triangle per piece, from a frame after the setting is done:

  swift run Example-Recreations-MonirFarmanfarmaian-MirrorFamily --export-usdz relief.usda --frame 600
  • BehindGlass: after the Mazes (2014 and 2015), where channels of glass painted green on the back spiral in toward the middle between strips of mirror. Reverse-glass painting has to be done backwards: what is painted first ends up on top, so the lines go on first and the backing last, and everything is painted as its own mirror image. The sketch paints one pane that way, from behind. It lays the blue edges of every channel and the outline of a flower, then sponges the green into the channels and the red into the petals, then covers the whole back with silver, which hides everything. Then it turns the pane over. Each polygon is split into kites, one at each corner, and a kite always has a circle touching all four of its sides, so a spiral stepped in from every side meets in the middle. firstSides picks the first panel, band the distance from one lap to the next, pace the speed of the hand, and hold how long the finished pane hangs. An original Ollin interpretation. Her mazes are cut pieces of painted glass and mirror set side by side; the sketch paints all of it on one pane, so the order of the layers can be seen.
  swift run Example-Recreations-MonirFarmanfarmaian-BehindGlass

The pane from behind, when the silver is on, and from the front, as marks in the order they were painted:

  swift run Example-Recreations-MonirFarmanfarmaian-BehindGlass --export-svg back.svg --frame 840
  swift run Example-Recreations-MonirFarmanfarmaian-BehindGlass --export-svg front.svg --frame 1100
  • Geometric: after the felt-tip drawings on a grid of triangles, Geometric (2013 and 2014) and On Hexagon (2012). She ruled the whole sheet with equal triangles in fine black pen and crossed it with sparser red, green, and orange lines through the same points. A hexagon sits at the middle with smaller ones inside it. Each ring between two of them is hatched with lines parallel to its sides, closer together toward the middle, so the hexagon reads as a tunnel. Outside it, some of the triangles are filled with short strokes of felt-tip in two colors, most of them in pairs that meet at a point like a bow tie. The sketch rules one sheet in the order a hand would, holds it, and starts the next. The filled pairs are mirrored left to right and top to bottom. cell is the side of one triangle, rings how many hexagons nest, hatch how many lines cross the outer ring, ties how many pairs are dealt, pace how fast the hand works, and hold how long the finished sheet stays. The seed is the sheet. An original Ollin interpretation written from the drawings.
  swift run Example-Recreations-MonirFarmanfarmaian-Geometric

Every mark is a stroke, so the export is a plotter drawing. Every corner lands on a point of the grid, or of the grid cut finer for the hatching and the zigzags:

  swift run Example-Recreations-MonirFarmanfarmaian-Geometric --export-svg sheet.svg --frame 1860
  • Convertible: after the Convertibles (2010 to 2016), sets of identical mirror modules that can be hung in many arrangements, "folded and unfolded according to diagrams drawn by the artist", with the modules after Tir (2015). Tir's six kites are the hexagon's own: cut a hexagon from its center to the middle of every side and it falls into six kites with corners of 60, 90, 120, and 90 degrees. Tir turns them around a hexagonal opening like a pinwheel. The sketch cuts each polygon of her family into its kites and searches for every way they can hang. Each arrangement turns the set about one point, every kite lies along another's edge, flush or slid along it by a third, a half, or two thirds, and no two overlap. Each polygon from the triangle to the heptagon gives seven arrangements: the polygon closed, and three pinwheels turning either way. The octagon gives thirty-five, rings and stars among them, and shows twelve (one of her Convertibles, Aram, can be hung in twelve compositions). Between two arrangements every kite moves as one rigid piece. It comes off the wall, turns and travels, and hangs again, with the kites held at different distances from the wall so none passes through another. A pinwheel that only opens further slides along the wall instead. firstSides picks the first set, rings how finely each kite is cut into facets, seconds how long a move takes, and hold how long each arrangement hangs. An original Ollin interpretation.
  swift run Example-Recreations-MonirFarmanfarmaian-Convertible

The set as meshes, four to a kite, from a frame where the first pinwheel hangs:

  swift run Example-Recreations-MonirFarmanfarmaian-Convertible --export-usdz set.usda --frame 560

This is a homage after Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, made for learning. It isn't a reproduction of a specific work, it isn't affiliated with or endorsed by the artist or her estate, and none of her work was used to make it.

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