Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

"It has taken her a long while to begin getting the recognition she so deserves. Monir was born in 1924, and spent much of her life in exile, though more recently she had moved back to Tehran to work there. In her long life she was a key part of New York based artist circles, but what I find so interesting in her work is how she revisits the visual archive of the Islamic culture she was born and grew up with, and how she translates this into a contemporary artistic language. In a way not dissimilar to Robert Voit, her work poses the question: what is the legacy and the heritage an artist starts with? How do these become important elements in an artistic practice? In Monir’s case, this is the craftsmanship and artisanal artistic practice of mirror mosaics and painted glass that have featured in the patterning of Islamic Art. She then translates these historic visual references into artwork that relates to modern Western geometric abstraction. She’s really part of a wide discussion on pattern, on decoration and abstraction. So I chose to include her because I think hers is certainly an extremely interesting life, but her work really captures ideas of cultural inheritance that are really critical for understanding the art historical context of artworks. Here again I really like the way the book was produced. It’s inspiring to read about a life and art that goes beyond our standardised, Western-focused art history. “It’s not that an artist has to circulate words about their own creativity necessarily, but we learn so much through the eyes of artists about what surrounds them, the social and creative context in which they’re working, and the very process of being an artist, the challenges that are involved in leading a creative life.” There is a global dialogue to explore here. At Hauser & Wirth we recently started work on a book about the Los Angeles-based painter Luchita Hurtado , a Venezuelan-born American artist. Shifting our focus momentarily from the Middle East of Monir to the Americas, it’s interesting to note that Hurtado is one of these extraordinarily long-lived artists—she celebrates her 100th birthday this year—whose life is a kind of artistic testament. Late in life she is finally receiving attention as we increasingly come to the realisation that it’s important to speak with individuals and record their history. Although associated with a vast network of internationally renowned artists and intellectuals throughout the decades, including Mexican muralists, Surrealists, and members of Dynaton (and having lived in New York, Mexico City and San Francisco), Hurtado’s practice always remained an independent—and until recent years, largely private—pursuit. Oral history is becoming something that is seeing increasing interest and understanding, and relates very closely to the sort of projects that somebody like Hans Ulrich Obrist is driving forward. It is absolutely critical in my view to make sure we don’t lose these stories. Artists who have lived an entire century have so much they can tell us about their artistic circles, their practice and the society in which they lived. This element of testimony is for me very interesting and very important. It runs through all of the books in my selection. Being witness to an extraordinary century, expanding our understanding of what actually transpired during that century helps us to enter the 21st century with our eyes wide open. We are realising that often we’ve had a somewhat blinkered view of what’s happened in the last hundred years. It’s about languages. Visual and artistic languages. It’s not that these languages become uniform over time or in contact with other cultures. They keep their local identity. If we open our minds to the work of an artist like Monir we see how rich and relevant it is today. This book was published to coincide with a show of hers at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2015. The rationale for my selection was really to make archives more accessible to a wider audience. Each of these books makes archival material immediate and compelling. And by that I meant not only the physical documents and actual physical archives that exist, but above all the mental archive of artists. These are all books that give individual artists—living and long gone—a voice."