Mohamad Ebrahim Jafari (b. 1940) was a modernist painter and contemporary poet who, in his works, linked nature and rural life with art and conveyed a familiar atmosphere to the viewer. Most of his paintings are inspired by poems; he considered himself more as a poet, rather than a painter.
Jafari was born in Borujerd city of Lorestan province, Iran. He was interested in nature since he was a child. He studied literature in high school, composed his first poems when he was young, and took up painting under influence of an artist associated with Ghahveh-Khaneh school called "Fani". In 1959, he started studying painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, and attended the workshops of Ali-Mohamad Heydarian and Mahmoud Javadipour among others. He was acquainted with artists such as Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam and was in close contact with Asghar Mohammadi and Gholamhossein Nami. In 1969, he traveled to Europe and showed his works in many solo and group exhibitions including the Paris Biennale of the same year. He also attended the Connie Surmaire Art Festival in France and achieved the national award of the country in 1974.
Clay inscriptions with plain surfaces and brief carvings were among his first integrated works in the 1960s and 1970s, which reminds the viewer of desert cities and collapsed mud forts. According to himself, these inscriptions are reminders of his childhood and his indigenous sensibility that have always been sources of inspiration for him and have emerged in modern forms throughout these works. His use of mud as the main material is innovative and unconventional, and at the same time seems to accord with Iranian tradition. These naive and minimalistic inscriptions remind us of Iran's desert cities' atmosphere.
Jafari's painting techniques are mostly watercolor and ink wash with mud, guache, and sometimes polystyrene as the base. In his paintings, he puts a special emphasis on "happening" and improvisation in creating art. This impulsiveness of expression gives him the qualities of a poet-painter.
For the first time, during the 1980s, there were signs of darkness, violence, and terror visible in his works. This was due to his experience of the Iranian revolution and Iraq-Iran war and was also a result of the social conditions of the time, leading him to create his monoprint series during this decade. Another series of his artworks were exhibited in 1998 in his last show entitled "Unread Inscriptions" at Golestan Gallery.
Jafari was a teacher of art and faculty member of the University of Tehran for many years. He died of a stroke in March 2018 at Madaen hospital, Tehran. The next year, a selection of artworks of the five-decade period of his artistic practice was displayed in a show called "Traveling with the Moon" at Iranian Artists Forum and then published in a book with the same title. The books "You Sang Like a Night Bird and Went", consisting of his songs, and "Scent of Thatch, Song of Bird", which includes a selection of his poems, were published in 2019.
