Lot 39: FARIDEH LASHAIE

FARIDEH LASHAIE B. 1944 RABBITS, PRELUDE TO ALICE IN WONDERLAND oil and acrylic on canvas with animation projection 200 by 180cm.; 78 3/4 by 70 7/8 in. Executed in 2010, this work is Artist's Proof 1/1 aside from an edition of 7.

As the first episode of the new body of works Rabbit, Prelude to Alice in Wonderland, we go back in time to see the birth of the white rabbit. The rabbits appear and meet, the animated rabbits moving delicately with the rhythm of Chopin's Nocturne for Piano No. 1 in B flat minor, approaching one another, a moment of meeting, giving birth outside the window of the painting followed by a scene of exodus. The white rabbit remains in the painting, the painting lighting up in high luminosity preparing us for the body of work Rabbit, Prelude to Alice in Wonderland that will come into form in the artist next exhibition.

In this series, the rabbit sniffs the way, as the intellectual, the artist to the rabbit hole, an entry to Iran. The map of Iran has been alluded to the shape of a cat, the white rabbit jump in the rabbit hole, in this case the expanding deep mouth of the cat devouring the rabbit in Iran's history. The rabbit then enters and passes through few scenes of Iran's history of great magnitude, from a dance scene in the court of Shah Abbas the mighty king of the Safavid era to a walk and lengthy conversation with Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, the Iranian prime minister who nationalized Iran's oil industry in 1951, and whose image has been the subject matter of a series of work by Farideh Lashaie in recent years.

Like in Lashaie's other works, painting is the central medium, the video is animated drawings, remaining close and morphing into the medium of painting. For the artist, this series of video paintings are a process of reconstructing both the unknown and the familiar imagery into moving fairytales. It is a blow of magic with which invisible creatures that had no shape or form appear from the depth of a mysterious abstract jungle, full of life and charged with untold narratives, expanding the painting as an elastic structure in time, material and space, then disappear, leaving behind a silent still painting, yet now charged with the mythical, the imagined, and creating colossal spaces for fantasies. In the Iranian literary history, symbolic figures appear and reappear to survive a tyrannical suppression of candour and free expression. References and guises fill this vocabulary throughout centuries. And the Iranian art and the Iranian psyche continue to flow in abstraction and in referential forms.