About the Lot

Charles Hossein Zenderoudi is one of Iran's most accomplished modern artists, as a founding father Iranian neo-traditionalism Zenderoudi is a master of blending traditional Persian motif's within a distinctly avant-garde aesthetic. His choice of subject matter, calligraphy, has historically been the most established mode of formal artistic expression prevalent in Iran, but, by emphasising form over meaning, and by stripping the written word down to its aesthetic, structural, fundaments, Zenderoudi subverts the traditional values of Persian calligraphy. Zenderoudi's text is intentionally illegible and carries no literal meaning, freeing it from the constraint of linguistic limitation, and imbuing it with a sense of universality which rescues the archaic practice of calligraphy from obscurity, giving it renewed relevance in a contemporary context. Works from the present series, composed in the 1970's, mark a shift towards a more avant-garde, patterned, technical and measured approach to calligraphy. The crowded iconography of the early works is replaced by a greater focus on singular and recurring letter-forms, which exhibit a formal refinement lacking in their earlier counterparts. The present work also marks a conceptual shift away from the more overtly traditional subject matters and more towards a pure, patterned aesthetic which emphasises the meditative and visual elements of letter depiction over their linguistic connotation. (Source: www.bonhams.com)

Previous Record

• Tehran Auction, Classic and Modern Iranian Art, 26 Jan 2024, Sold price: 15,620,000,000 Toman

Provenance

Property from a private collection, New York