Lot 35: FARIDEH LASHAI (IRAN, 1944-2013) Trees oil on canvas, framed signed

FARIDEH LASHAI (IRAN, 1944-2013) Trees oil on canvas, framed signed Farideh Lashai in Farsi (lower left), executed circa early 1970s 150 x 90cm (59 1/16 x 35 7/16in).

Provenance Property from a private collection, London Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner, circa early 1970’s Literature For similar works from the Tree Series, see: Germano Celant and Faryar Javaherian, Towards the Ineffable: Farideh Lashai at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, TMOCA Press, 2016, p.81, 89 Graceful, sophisticated and exhibiting a deep reverence for its subject matter, the present painting is perhaps the rarest and most significant work by Farideh Lashai ever to surface at auction. Painted in the early 1970’s when Lashai had just returned to Iran after her studies in Austria, the work sees Lashai at her most naturalistic. Influenced by her contact with the new emergent artistic avant-garde of Iran, including figures like Sohrab Sepehri, Lashai’s works from the Tree Series, of which this is the first to appear auction, are a rare glimpse of a painter at the bloom of her artistic maturity. Farideh Lashai is remembered as one of the most talented and successful artists to have emerged from within Iran in recent decades. Meticulous, erudite and supremely perceptive, her work is characterized by a mastery of the painterly aesthetic, using the visual vocabulary of abstract and lyrical expressionism in depiction of ethereal natural landscapes, allegorical compositions, and colour fields. Above all, Lashai’s enduring talent lied in her conceptual and aesthetic originality, and her ability to draw from established artistic traditions without being confined by their precepts. As an artist with abstraction as her genesis, she is nevertheless unafraid of the concrete, as a craftswoman fluent in the language of the brush, she felt comfortable experimenting with video art, installation and new media, it is this unrestricted, intrepid sense of creativity which is so palatable in much of her work.