LONDON.- This autumn The Mosaic Rooms opens the first UK exhibition dedicated to Behjat Sadr (1924-2009), now regarded as one of Iran’s most influential and radical visual artists. The exhibition will bring together a selection of masterpieces by the artist never seen before in the UK. The display will reveal Sadr’s dramatic artistic journey against the backdrop of bitter political events, taking into consideration the lack of acknowledgment of her work during her lifetime and even after her death. Revealing her inner struggles as a woman who had to fight a male dominated art scene the exhibition is also a testament to how she paved the way for the emancipation of future generations of Iranian women artists.

Each of the three gallery spaces at The Mosaic Rooms will be dedicated to a city that was instrumental in shaping Sadr’s practice. Sadr’s own career path is evidence of a nascent cosmopolitan modernity that emerged in and between Tehran, Rome and Paris where the artist eventually settled after the 1979 Revolution.

Through a selection of artworks and archive material, the first room will explore the Sadr’s time in Italy which marked her first encounter with Western modernity. Along with numerous other young Iranian artists (as well as artists from Arab countries), Sadr settled in Rome and like Bahman Mohasses and Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam, she studied with professor Roberto Melli at the Academia in Rome in 1955, obtaining her diploma at The School of Fine Arts in Naples in 1958. Following her time in Italy Sadr developed her signature style informed by European modernism and the local experience of modernity in Iran within a cultural context influenced heavily by Western political powers and art movements.

The main room considers Sadr’s time in Tehran, Iran, where her practice developed significantly in the 1960s. At this stage in her life, Sadr had earned her reputation as one of the first women artists and professors to appear in international biennales of the early 1960s (Tehran Biennales of 1962 and 1964, the 1962 Venice Biennale and an exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne in Paris in 1963). The display focuses on the artist’s remarkable kinetic works and paintings created solely using black paint and reveal the artist’s dexterity using paint to achieve bold and dazzling results. Sadr is best known for her abstract paintings that blend expressionistic gestures inspired by natural forms with a hard-edged industrial aesthetic.

The third room explores the artist’s collages, most of which Sadr created whilst in living in Paris. She felt excluded as a foreigner from Paris’ close-knit art scene and ill health prevented her from maintaining a painting practice. During this final period of her artistic life Sadr developed an introspective experimental practice through collage. The display also features numerous personal photographs of her travels searching for modern and vernacular architecture worldwide, but also her ‘atmospheric visual atlas’ of landscape photographs that the artist used as cut outs.

This exhibition is part of The Mosaic Rooms 10 Years anniversary programme which runs until September 2019.

Behjat Sadr was born in Arak, Iran in 1924. After studying at the faculty of fine arts at the University of Tehran, Behjat Sadr went to Rome, where she graduated toward abstract painting and informal art. Leaving frames and traditional colours behind, she used synthetic industrial paints that she ran on supports placed on the ground. When she returned to Iran at the end of the 1950s, her experiments with subject and gesture were quickly noticed by Pierre Restany and, later, Michel Ragon. In the 1980s, when she split her time between Paris and Tehran, she notably produced photomontages in an unusual style reminiscent of her painting. Her works
have been exhibited in many institutions in France and abroad: Galleria La Bussola, Rome (1958); Venice Biennale (1956, 1962); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1963); Grey Foundation, Saint Paul, Minnesota (1971); Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels (1972); Centre d’art Le Noroît, Arras (1985); Grey Art Gallery, New York (2010); Asia Society, New York (2013- 2014); Musée d’art modern de la ville de Paris / MAXXI Rome (20142015). In 2004, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art devoted a large retrospective to her, as part of the series of exhibitions devoted to pioneers of modern art in Iran.