Farhad Moshiri

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Farhad Moshiri was born in 1963 in Shiraz, Iran, and studied fine arts at CALARTS in California. In America he first started experimenting with installations, video art and painting before coming back to Tehran in 1991.

He loves collecting old pottery, and seeks to render the age-old relationship between ceramic form and function by focusing on paint as an expressive visual media. His painted jars, which he is best known for, look like three dimensional objects, bursting with popular foods, drinks and deserts that evoke the street vendors that sell them. Elegant popular scripts, recognisable, distinctive reflections of bygone local culture, are written on the body of the large painted jars, like an epigraph that can be read as a prayer or a wish.

The striking elegant shape of the vessels, with their thick bodies, simple contours and unobtrusive coloured surfaces, are inspired by the antique goblets, jars and bottles discovered on the 6000-year old site of Susa, Sassanid pots and the work of 13th century Iranian potters. Moshiri’s massive undecorated sand-glazed jars, of simple primal forms, resemble the utilitarian stoneware jars used for preserving and storing grain, rice and tea leaves, or for cooling water or housing offerings.

The texture of the paintings resemble the crackled ice glaze, reflecting the artist’s appreciation of unglazed or naturally glazed stoneware vessels; a texture reminiscent of thick coils of un-worked clay and the colours of old pieces in the monochrome ceramic tradition that flourished in ancient Iran. The use of layers of different tones of the same colour, plain bold colours, the sheer simplicity of the form and the modesty of the words chosen, all reflect Moshiri’s love of Zen philosophy and aesthetics.

Today Moshiri's works are becoming increasingly popular throughout Iran and the more aware Islamic contemporary art collectors.