CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/25/2015

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Cosmic Geometry

In the Fall of 2011, Damiani published the surprising and enlightening book, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Cosmic Geometry—the first substantial survey of the Iranian artist whose work is currently on view at the Guggenheim. In the book—which includes texts by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Frank Stella, among others—art historian Media Farzin writes, "At their most complex, the mirror-works elaborate on their source material with the rhythmic repetitions of a musical refrain. They allow forms and potentialities to flow through their structure as they build on pre-existing themes and motifs. They capture the very idea of potential, the long view that is needed to recognize the forces that organize matter in the world. It is misleading to explain them by discussing their provisional subject or technique. They are about movements, connections, relationships, progressions, appropriations and redistributions. If their diagrammatic structures have a theme or subject matter, it is their own limitless potential for repetition and difference: how their order facilitates invention, and how their past contains their future." Birds, 1977, (mirror, reverse-glass painting and plaster on wood) is reproduced from Cosmic Geometry.