This document provides biographical information about two artists - Hossein Zenderoudi and Frank Stella. It discusses Zenderoudi's background and influences, and highlights how he pioneered a new style of art in Iran that incorporated calligraphy. It also analyzes Zenderoudi's artistic evolution and focus on global communication. The document then briefly outlines Frank Stella's background, influences, and career progression from minimalist paintings in the 1960s to relief sculptures in later decades.
4. Hossein Zenderoudi (born 1937
Tehran) is an Iranian painter and
sculptor, known especially as a
pioneer of Iranian modern art. His
work Tchaar Bagh was sold at
Christi's International auction in
Dubai for $1.6 million.
Hossein Zenderoudi is the man of
measure in communication, a
measure conditioned by memory,
which is an essential factor in the
artist’s distancing of creativity
from the semantic and formal
elements of his idiom. This
globalizing memory is that of a
continuing Shiite Islam, but also of
2500 years of Persian antiquity
dominated by the reformist
Zenderoudi was soon attracted by
writing. Being the support of
communication, writing is also the
depository of sacredness, or more
exactly, of its trace. In the eternal
struggle between good and evil,
the sacred manifests its presence
by summoning us back to the two
essential options, truth and justice.
Art in its references to it proposes
the trace of good: the trace and
not the traced. This distinction is
the linchpin of Zenderoudi’s
intuition, forming the inner
guidance that governs the whole
development of his oeuvre. Arabic
calligraphy offers an inexhaustible
reservoir of signs, dots, letters and
numbers, from which the trace of
being in real life can be re-
established.
Zenderoudi was still a student at
the fine arts school of his home city
when he laid the foundations in
1960 for a pictorial movement that
was to renovate the spirit of
eastern gestural writing: the Sagha
Khaneh school. The school, which
gets its name from the fountain-
stops decorated with popular
illuminations or with verses from
the Koran, where passers-by can
quench their thirst, gives writing
the sacredness of an existential
quotidian magic. A prize-winner at
the Paris Biennale the following
year, Zenderoudi settled in Paris in
1961. There he developed a
robustly original graphic style which
established itself brilliantly within
the moving lyrical abstraction of
the time, halfway between the free
action of Informel and the
signifying-signified dialectic of
Lettrisme.
5. Zenderoudi arrived in Paris at the
end of the widespread infatuation
with gestural calligraphy. He was
able to ascertain for himself the
signifying limits of the traced in
writing, and to boost his crucial
intuition of graphic distance
through trace. The immediate
trace of the sign is its imprint:
and in each period of his work the
artist turned to stamping imprints.
There are traces of it in the first
compositions at the Sagha Khaneh
school, in 1958-60, on oiled brown
wrapping papers or linens, where
wads represent votive padlocks.
Their repetitive and accumulative
composition continued throughout
the ‘90s, notably in the series of
cities or in that of the Virgin of
Constantinople. From 1999 and in
the past two years, Zenderoudi
has substituted the photographic
negative for the printing of signs or
images. Views of Iranian
landscapes emerge from wide
colour fields animated by broad
strokes of vibrant paint, thus
bringing us to the tip of continuity
in the structural weft of writing
traced in Zenderoudi’s work: the
fleeting evocation of reality in the
pictorial flow of global
communication. In 1961 the artist
had kept his distance from the
gestural conformity of lyrical
abstraction, by developing the
quantitative language technique of
repetitive stamping imprints, as did
Arman in early works like “Les
Cachets” (1955-58). In 1999
Zenderoudi turned to another
technique of quantitative language:
that of the photographic transfer.
This type of transfer is of capital
importance if we are to judge the
present dimension of an oeuvre
founded on spiritual tradition,
linked to a holy scripture and thus
devoted to a certain referential
continuity, but dominated by an
“inner guidance”: that of a
necessity for global
communication.
The requirement of global
communication implies two
objectives in the public’s reception
of the message, namely semantic
transmission and spiritual
participation. The two keys to its
interpretation are indissolubly
welded in the spirit of their creator:
6. “Men the world over are identical
and can all read my work. What
matters is to achieve a harmony
between the person who created it
and the spectator” This twofold
goal sets the true measure of the
creative act in Zenderoudi’s work,
of the supple and adaptable
climate of spiritual realism that
surrounds it. That is the lesson of
profound humanism drawn from
his Koranic culture and from the
teachings of the theologian Ostad
Elahi: the soul is the object of
knowledge, which implies the
superseding of any dichotomy
between matter and mind,
rationalism and spirituality.
Significantly, the artist has
illustrated the Koran and
illuminated Ostad Elahi’s
“Traces of Truth”, which are
prominent among his
contributions to the bibliophily of
high spirituality.
Suppleness in the transmission of
his message has enabled
Zenderoudi at various points in his
career to cut out a cultural
situation for himself and to ensure
its actuality in an original and
specific way. After Sagha Khaneh
came the Parisian Informel and
Lettrisme. Faithful to his strategy of
detachment from calligraphy,
Zenderoudi favours the trace as
opposed to the traced, in writing.
To favour the trace compared to
the traced is to divert the sign in
order better to appropriate it.
When Zenderoudi introduces the
printed image of the Angel or of
the Virgin of Constantinople into
his work, he remains faithful to the
demand for communication. He
presents the trace of an icon within
the global flow of information, and
there it admirably transmits its
message of transcendental
spirituality. In the panorama of
global culture everything has its
place: be it black bryony, the Jesus
label or the Coca Cola logo. A
closeness to the public’s heart
always occurs at the right level of
each spectator’s affectivity.
Zenderoudi’s spiritual realism
allows him to believe in the truth
and justice of communicational
space: the soul is equally at ease in
the dense fabric of a calligraphic
weave, in the immaterial ether of a
media flow, or on an evanescent
and fleeting monitor screen.
7.
8. Yes, my dear Hossein, you have
convinced me: I find the same
“warmth of distance” in a canvas
print in mixed medium dated 1994
as in a coloured photographic
transfer of the Iranian desert in
2001. Another canvas done in
1994 was titled “Luminous
Instants”. Now I await many more
of these luminous instants, in the
photomechanical style brought
into fashion by Andy Warhol forty
years ago and which you have
today sealed with your own
unmistakable trace of justice and
truth.
You are mentioned, Hossein,
as an example of East-West
synthesis. Rather than confine
myself to noticing its effect, I
prefer to retrace an analysis of its
cause, which lies in that demand
for global communication, the
manifestation of a fundamental
intuition which made you drop the
self-reductive voluntarism of a
formalist trace of writing to the
advantage of a supple system of
traces. In assuming the distanced
memory of an original language,
these traces liberate its universal
value. When they distance
themselves from the Arabic
alphabet traced, to assume the
form of architectures of signs or of
inner landscapes, woven fabrics of
meditation, I submit to their
spellbinding power and find it
perfectly normal for the titles given
to these works to stress their
linguistic detachment.
After all, never mind if there is
more or less water in the glasses
and so much the better if one can
take tea together. I undergo in all its
plenitude the visual effect of the
message's global communication.
No plenitude without saturation.
Today the destiny of images in the
global flow of communication is
played out on the evanescence of
the television screen. The trace of
the electronic image conveyed by
media also experiences its
saturation effect: diluted in the
total jamming of the screen at the
end of a broadcast or programme.
Don’t the “inner spaces” saturated
with Zenderoudi’s signs herald the
trace of another saturation of visual
language - that of the small screen
open onto an empty chain of
programmes? What difference is
there,
9. from the point of view of the
distancing of memory, between a
screen saturated with electronic
impulses without any informative
impact, and a canvas entirely
covered with the traces of signs of
an anonymous writing?
None at all: the two effects of
saturation belong within the same
operational logic as the demand
for global communication. And
it is to that logic that Zenderoudi
responds instinctively when he
switches from the italic sign to the
image,
and also when he incorporates the
printed or photographic trace on
canvas or paper depicting the
space of that informative
impact of the artist’s global
message.
Hossein Zenderoudi is the bearer
of a precious gift: a fundamental
intuition that drove him straight
away in his art to speak of just and
true things by their trace and to
create an effect of detachment in
the artist’s and in the public’s
memory. What is the exact
proportion of East and West in
this major option and its
spectacular virtue of
enchantment? It matters little, it
is the mystery of God’s talent and
finger.
It is in any case upon this concept
of distanced memory that the
entire philosophy of media
information and its supreme end-
purpose, global communication,
rests today. Distance brings the
media public closer to the depth of
a conceptual field indispensable to
the global perception of the
message addressed to it, whatever
its semantic density may be.
Hossein Zenderoudi thus finds
himself quite naturally in the midst
of the most topical issue affecting
the globalizing world of
information. His work provides the
establishment of a planetary
ascendancy by electronic media
with a universalist reference and
individual answer. At this early
point in the third millennium of the
Christian era, this Iranian citizen of
the world without frontiers of
spiritual thought and of media
information, seems to me more
than ever like the man of true and
just measure in communication.
http://www.zenderoudi.com/englis
h/english.html
12. Frank Philip Stella
born May 12, 1936
is an American painter, sculptor
and printmaker, noted for his work
in the areas of minimalism and
post-painterly abstraction. Stella
lives and works in New York City.
Biography
Frank Stella was born in Malden,
Massachusetts,to parents of
Italian descent. His father was a
gynecologist, and his mother was
an artistically inclined housewife
who attended a fashion school and
later took up landscape painting.
After attending high school at
Phillips Academy in Andover,
Massachusetts, where he learned
about abstract modernists Josef
Albers and Hans Hofmann, he
attended Princeton University,
where he majored in history and
met Darby Bannard and Michael
Fried. Early visits to New York art
galleries fostered his artistic
development, and his work was
influenced by the abstract
expressionism of Jackson Pollock
and Franz Kline. Stella moved to
New York in 1958, after his
graduation. He is one of the most
well-regarded postwar American
painters still working today.He is
heralded for creating abstract
paintings that bear no pictorial
illusions or psychological or
metaphysical references in
twentieth-century painting.
As of 2015, Stella lives in Greenwich
Village and keeps an office there
but commutes on weekdays to his
studio in Rock Tavern, New York.
Work
Late 1950s and early 1960s
Upon moving to New York City, he
reacted against the expressive use
of paint by most painters of the
abstract expressionist movement,
instead finding himself drawn
towards the "flatter" surfaces of
Barnett Newman's work and the
"target" paintings of Jasper Johns.
He began to produce works which
emphasized the picture-as-object,
rather than the picture as a
representation of something, be it
something in the physical world, or
something in the artist's emotional
world. Stella married Barbara Rose,
later a well-known art critic, in
1961-1969.
13. Around this time he said that a
picture was "a flat surface with
paint on it - nothing more". This
was a departure from the
technique of creating a painting
by first making a sketch. Many of
the works are created by simply
using the path of the brush stroke,
very often using common house
paint.
This new aesthetic found
expression in a series of new
paintings, the Black Paintings (59)
in which regular bands of black
paint were separated by very thin
pinstripes of unpainted canvas. Die
Fahne Hoch! (1959) is one such
painting. It takes its name "The
Raised Banner" from the first
line of the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the
anthem of the National Socialist
German Workers Party, and Stella
pointed out that it is in the same
proportions as banners used by
that organization. It has been
suggested that the title has a
double meaning, referring also to
Jasper Johns' paintings of flags. In
any case, its emotional coolness
belies the contentiousness its title
might suggest, reflecting this new
direction in Stella's work. Stella’s
art was recognized for its
innovations before he was twenty-
five. In 1959, several of his
paintings were included in "Three
Young Americans" at the Allen
Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin
College, as well as in "Sixteen
Americans" at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York (60).
From 1960 Stella began to produce
paintings in aluminium and copper
paint which, in their presentation
of regular lines of color separated
by pinstripes, are similar to his
black paintings. However they use a
wider range of colors, and are his
first works using shaped canvases
(canvases in a shape other than the
traditional rectangle or square),
often being in L, N, U or T-shapes.
These later developed into more
elaborate designs, in the Irregular
Polygon series (67), for example.
Also in the 1960s, Stella began to
use a wider range of colors,
typically arranged in straight or
curved lines. Later he began his
Protractor Series (71) of paintings,
in which arcs, sometimes
overlapping, within square borders
are arranged side-by-side to
produce full and half circles painted
in rings of concentric color.
14. These paintings are named after
circular cities he had visited while
in the Middle East earlier in the
1960s. The Irregular Polygon
canvases and Protractor series
further extended the concept of
the shaped canvas.
Late 1960s and early 1970s
Stella began his extended
engagement with printmaking in
the mid-1960s, working first with
master printer Kenneth Tyler at
Gemini G.E.L. Stella produced a
series of prints during the late
1960s starting with a print called
Quathlamba I in 1968. Stella's
abstract prints used lithography,
screenprinting, etching and offset
lithography.
In 1967, he designed the set and
costumes for Scramble, a dance
piece by Merce Cunningham. The
Museum of Modern Art in New
York presented a retrospective of
Stella’s work in 1970, making him
the youngest artist to receive
one.[citation needed] During the
following decade,
Stella introduced relief into his
art, which he came to call
“maximalist” painting for its
sculptural qualities. The shaped
canvases took on even less regular
forms in the Eccentric Polygon
series, and elements of collage
were introduced, pieces of canvas
being pasted onto plywood, for
example. His work also became
more three-dimensional to the
point where he started producing
large, free-standing metal pieces,
which, although they are painted
upon, might well be considered
sculpture. After introducing wood
and other materials in the Polish
Village series (73), created in high
relief, he began to use aluminum as
the primary support for his
paintings. As the 1970s and 1980s
progressed, these became more
elaborate and exuberant. Indeed,
his earlier Minimalism became
baroque, marked by curving forms,
Day-Glo colors, and scrawled
brushstrokes. Similarly, his prints of
these decades combined various
printmaking and drawing
techniques. In 1973, he had a print
studio installed in his New York
house. In 1976, Stella was
commissioned by BMW to paint a
BMW 3.0 CSL for the second
installment in the BMW Art Car
Project.
15.
16. He has said of this project, "The
starting point for the art cars was
racing livery. In the old days there
used to be a tradition of
identifying a car with its country
by color. Now they get a number
and they get advertising. It’s a
paint job, one way or another.
The idea for mine was that it’s
from a drawing on graph paper.
The graph paper is what it is, a
graph, but when it’s morphed over
the car’s forms it becomes
interesting, and adapting the
drawing to the racing car’s forms
is interesting. Theoretically it’s
like painting on a shaped canvas."
In 1969, Stella was commissioned
to create a logo for the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Centennial. Medals incorporating
the design were struck to mark
the occasion.
1980s and afterward
From the mid-1980s to the mid-
1990s, Stella created a large body
of work that responded in a
general way to Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick. During this time, the
increasingly deep relief of Stella’s
paintings gave way to full three-
dimensionality, with sculptural
forms derived from cones,
pillars, French curves, waves, and
decorative architectural elements.
To create these works, the artist
used collages or maquettes that
were then enlarged and re-created
with the aids of assistants,
industrial metal cutters, and digital
technologies. La scienza della
pigrizia , from 1984, is an example
of Stella's transition from two-
dimensionality to three-
dimensionality. It is fabricated from
oil paint, enamel paint, and alkyd
paint on canvas, etched
magnesium, aluminum and
fiberglass.
In the 1990s, Stella began making
free-standing sculpture for public
spaces and developing architectural
projects. In 1993, for example, he
created the entire decorative
scheme for Toronto’s Princess of
Wales Theatre, which includes a
10,000-square-foot mural. His 1993
proposal for a Kunsthalle and
garden in Dresden did not come to
fruition. In 1997, he painted and
oversaw the installation of the
5,000-square-foot "Stella Project"
which serves as the centerpiece of
the theater and lobby of the
Moores Opera House
17. located at the Rebecca and
John J. Moores School of Music on
the campus of the University of
Houston, in Houston, TX.
His aluminum bandshell, I
nspired by a folding hat from
Brazil, was built in downtown
Miami in 2001; a monumental
Stella sculpture was installed
outside the National Gallery of
Art in Washington, D.C.
Stella's wall-hung Scarlatti K
Series was triggered by the
harpsichord sonatas of Domenico
Scarlatti and the writings of the
U.S. 20th-century harpsichord
virtuoso and musicologist Ralph
Kirkpatrick, who made the
sonatas widely known.
(The title's "K" refers to
Kirkpatrick's chronology numbers.)
Scarlatti wrote more than 500
keyboard sonatas; Stella's series
today includes about 150 works.
From 1978 to 2005, Stella owned
the Van Tassell and Kearney Horse
Auction Mart building in
Manhattan's East Village and used
it as his studio. His nearly 30-year
stewardship of the building
resulted in the facade being
cleaned and restored. After a six-
year campaign by the Greenwich
Village Society for Historic
Preservation, in 2012 the historic
building was designated a New York
City Landmark. After 2005, Stella
split his time between his West
Village apartment and his
Newburgh, New York studio.
Artists' rights
Stella had been an advocate of
strong copyright protection for
artists such as himself. On June 6,
2008, Stella with Artists Rights
Society president Theodore Feder;
Stella is a member artist of the
Artists Rights Society published an
Op-Ed for The Art Newspaper
decrying a proposed U.S. Orphan
Works law which "remove[s] the
penalty for copyright infringement
if the creator of a work, after a
diligent search, cannot be located."
18.
19. In the Op-Ed, Stella wrote,
The Copyright Office presumes that
the infringers it would let off the
hook would be those who had
made a "good faith, reasonably
diligent" search for the copyright
holder. Unfortunately, it is totally
up to the infringer to decide if he
has made a good faith search. Bad
faith can be shown only if a rights
holder finds out about the
infringement and then goes to
federal court to determine
whether the infringer has
failed to conduct an adequate
search. Few artists can afford the
costs of federal litigation:
attorneys’ fees in our country
vastly exceed the licensing fee
for a typical painting or drawing.
The Copyright Office proposal
would have a disproportionately
negative, even catastrophic,
impact on the ability of painters
and illustrators to make a living
from selling copies of their work...
It is deeply troubling that
government should be considering
taking away their principal means
of making ends meet—their
copyrights.
Exhibitions
Stella’s work was included in
several important exhibitions that
defined 1960s art[citation needed],
among them the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum’s The Shaped
Canvas (1965) and Systemic
Painting (1966). The Museum of
Modern Art in New York presented
a retrospective of Stella’s work in
1970.His art has since been the
subject of several retrospectives in
the United States, Europe, and
Japan. In 2012, a retrospective of
Stella's career was shown at the
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
20. Awards:
$2000 in cash awards will be given during Art Fest on the Green.
Best in Show $700
1st Place $500
2nd Place $300
3rd Place $200
3 Honorable
Mentions $100 each
Categories:
Drawings
Paintings
Photography
Printmaking
Mixed-media
Ceramics
Fiber
Furniture
Glass
Jewelry
Metal
Wood
For more information:
www.wellingtonartsociety.org
Leslie Pfeiffer, mysticway1@bellsouth.net
Toni Willey, tgwilleyart@gmail.com 18
21. Ghahvakhaneh art style is an Iranian style of art. This painting is a
colorful oil painting with martial, religious, and celebration themes
culminating in the late Qajar and early Pahlavi times of the Iranian
constitutional movement of the Mashroote it rose to popularity.
Significant examples of the works of the painters are kept at Reza
Abbasi Museum.
It’s background goes back to storytelling and stories of Shahnameh and
telling stories about karbala.
19