Santosh (né Gulam Rasool Dar) was born to a lower-middle-class family in the city of Srinagar, Kashmir. He dreamed of becoming an artist from an early age, but soon after his graduation from high school, his father’s untimely death forced him to turn to signboard painting and whitewashing walls. By the end of the 1940s […]
Following a trip to the bustling pilgrimage city of Varanasi in 1960, Kumar began to paint abstracted cityscapes, rendering their contours in thick impasto. In Kashmir, one of his most celebrated works, he reduces the city to an abstract map in which buildings are huddled together in a vibrant unit. Kumar’s expressionistic landscapes such as […]
Although Eren’s early works are figurative, from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s his imagery grew increasingly abstract. The color white dominates much of his non-figurative work, including Vision and Train Accident (G1975.289). After the 1970s, the “stains” in his compositions evolved into figures. Eren took painting courses with Semsi Arel during his years at […]
Elderoglu’s work is often described as abstract script painting, although he long denied the influence of calligraphy. His thin, unbroken black lines—which resemble scrawls accentuated with color—evoke letters from a hermetic alphabet. In Mask he combined these with a delicate background resembling the marbled pages of Ottoman manuscripts. Both Mask and Six Lines of Abstracted Calligraphy […]
Shirin, Beloved of King exemplifies how Tanavoli, lacking a significant modern Iranian sculptural tradition to build on, sought a different kind of lineage within Persian folklore. The title refers to the legend in which the stonecutter Farhad, driven by passion, carved mountains in honor of Shirin, fulfilling the challenge set forth by King Khosrow II […]
Sepehri’s admiration for nature is evident in abstract landscapes such as Canyon, whose sandy tones and deep ochers were inspired by the natural colors of the desert beyond Kashan. In 1970 Sepehri spent almost a year in New York, but he ultimately returned to Iran, feeling alienated among the bustling metropolitan streets.
This work is one of three in the NYU Art Collection from Pilaram’s series Mosques of Isfahan. For a discussion, see the entry for his Mosques of Isfahan (B), c. 1962.