HOSSEIN KAZEMI (1924- 1996)

A painter, ceramic artist and teacher, Hossein Kazemi was one of the greatest pioneers of Iranian modern art. He started his career as a figural painter and his earliest works were naturalistic. Gradually he began to introduce elements of the Persian miniature into his work, and his treatment became ever more stylized. From 1961 onwards, he started experimenting with pure abstraction, and when he returned to figurative painting, as he did with his stone-and-flower paintings of the late 1960s, it was in a more abstracted mould, with strong symbolic overtones. This theme continued for the rest of his career, variations and different combinations of flowers and stones, sometimes lacking one or the other element and becoming increasingly abstract. His growing fascination with the dualistic philosophy of Mithraism of ancient Iran was expressed in all of his mature paintings.

Hossein Kazemi landscapes were constructed from various media including paint, acid and plastofoam. His talent in applying those raw materials enabled him to create the most expressive effects of texture in his compositions. Kazemi's goal was to depict relief in nature on every possible medium therefore he is using plywood, canvas, cardboard but also paper as bases. The viewer is free to imagine landscapes, horizon lines, trees and sea shores through the mixture of various colours. This free combination of ideas belongs to the viewer even though the artist himself is describing his work as a principle of contraries to clash of light and darkness... which is the holy secret of unity in plurality and plurality in unity, in an interview for the London Kayhan newspaper in 1993.