Early Paintings
Venetia Porter
2006
2006
Early Paintings
Venetia Porter is curtor for the Islamic collections in the Department of Asia at the British Museum, London.
Early Paintings
نسخه فارسی
Hassanzadeh's early works of which the British Museum has three in the collection, directly reflect his experiences as a Basiji -one of the volunteers who fought in the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988)- and exemplify the subjects that concerned him at this time and the techniques he used in the paintings. His earliest works were painted in pastel on brown paper bags that he then used to sell fruit - his way of making a living in the years after the war during his artistic training. Joined together to create vast sheets, these early works are for the most part portraits of himself or of members of his family. They are posed, unsmiling, their faces -particularly that of his mother- lined and etched with pain. In the manner of an old-fashioned photographic studio, they are set against backgrounds that evoke delicately patterned wallpaper. There is always a rectangularly shaped window or a picture.
It is easy to imagine these people as victims: suffering perhaps the agony of widowhood, the loss of a child or brother. However the texts Hassanzadeh inscribes on some of these works in his light nasta'liq style of script add profound layers of meaning and complexity. In ‘I'm in love' a self-portrait of the artist, kneeling in the manner of a Classical Persian miniature, the texts are an extraordinary mixture of poetry and philosophical musings on the human condition. It starts however in prose; ‘And this act of demolishing becomes a basis for another destruction, and each destruction follows a demolition after a construction. And when everything is destroyed, it is only the legend, which seems real. Now if this world, which I am making or destroying -can be called a world- looks unfamiliar irrational and ugly, it is not my fault. Our present world suffers from these unfamiliarities, from being torn apart and breaking into pieces of values, or at least my world suffers from this imagination and only storm can soothe my chaos'.
Hassanzadeh continues with a poem after the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez;
I am in love
Right
But what bearing
When the storm twists
The tent of loneliness
The torn rope of the tent
And my stormy destiny
Oh
The themes represented here are further expanded upon in his later paintings. Characteristic however both in his early work and his oeuvre as a whole is the direct connection between his life, his experiences and his profound interest in Shi'a tradition that can be seen so dramatically in the Ashura series of paintings. As such Khosrow Hassanzadeh can be regarded as a direct inheritor of the Saqqakhaneh movement of Iranian Modernism which began in the 1960s in which past traditions were so well fused with a modern idiom.