Behjat Sadr (1924-2009) was a pioneer in the visual arts. Sadr embodied a daring cosmopolitan modernity. Living, studying and working between Tehran, Rome and Paris, she boldly challenged and disregarded artistic convention. As one of the first female artists to take part in the Iran Biennale in the 1960s while also being active and recognized in international exhibitions (representing Iran in the 1962 Venice Bienniale among several others including the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1963 and Comparisons at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris), she truly was a pioneer and maverick at the forefront of Iranian modernity.

She studied first at Tehran University and upon graduating in 1954, was awarded a scholarship in Italy graduating in 1958 from the Replica Handbags s School of Naples. She was in the company of other Iranian intellectuals and artists; Bahman Mohassess was a dear friend. It was after her first year in Italy in 1955 that she gave up on easel painting entirely and started to develop a personal style of abstraction but was not quite yet geometric. Her work is most recognizable for its thick, saturated brush strokes and the clear traces of paint manipulation: layers superimposed upon layers, horizontal and vertical, creating colour grids of a sort – somet.mes s worked through with less conventional tools, or her hands.

Sadr never could define a trigger or moment for this change. It was perhaps the move to Italy that led to a freeing on a cerebral level. As far as stylistic influences, this was unlike Mohassess, who was drawn to Etruscan and Greco-Roman sculpture. However, they both wanted to create art that was provocative rather than, beautiful.

Sadr went on to develop a distinct style of abstract expressionism. Her attention was to form and material: its spontaneous and intuitive movement with her body; the hope was always to capture a moment, a “halt in the flow of existence, plunging us into a state that is neither completely related to life nor completely related to death” as Giulio Carlo Argan, an influential art historian at the t.mes describes of her work. She transcended and had no interest in traditional representational art and is perhaps one of the first known Iranian artists who successfully took on action painting.

There was great intimacy between Sadr and the way she manipulated her materials; the lyricism of her work comes from the balance she strikes between the manipulation of the paint, the saturations of black and the shapes and angles she creates – to Sadr, there were infinite combinations of form and colour.

Her use of black is notable and came from her preoccupation with crude oil, which became a metaphor. The oil wealth of Iran that was enabling the arts and culture to blossom, a system which was in a way dictatorial and one which she both belonged to and challenged. Her pieces reflect these contradictory forces. As scholar and curator Morad Montazami says: “she saw blackness more as an experimental space rather than as a symbolic colour. The colour becomes more like a texture that you can experiment with.”

Her use of oil, black and application of thick brushstrokes feature heavily through her career. Intentionally ambiguous in their heavily textured representation, they shift from looking like tree bark; abstracted landscapes, calligraphy or simply just, form and colour. These visual motifs remained in her later, photo collage work, creating frames and windows into fractured and constructed memories from personal photos.

Sadr ultimately made the choice to leave Italy in spite of the encouragement of a blossoming career there. She first moved to Paris in the late 1960s, later moving to Tehran to take up a position at the university, where she taught for almost twenty years. Notably, she was the first Iranian female artist to become a professor at the Faculty of Replica Handbags . She later became the Director of the Visual Arts Department at the University of Tehran. Following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Sadr left her country and re-settled in Paris with her daughter.

Sadr’s oeuvre can be divided into six periods. From the early to mid-1960s, she developed a more gestural style. From 1967-68 she experimented with optical kinetic art – of which only a few examples exist as they were destroyed and not well received at the t.mes . Towards the end of the 1960s she became more experimental, which led to her most successful period between 1974-79. The 1980s, in her final period, she worked predominantly in collage.

While Sadr truly was at the forefront of Iranian cosmopolitan modernity, she was marginalized as a result of her gender and her style. However, four years prior to her passing, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art held a retrospective for Sadr, an homage to her as a pioneer of modern art in Iran. Behjat Sadr’s works have recently been exhibited widely internationally including: "Behjat Sadr: Dusted Waters", The Mosaic Rooms, London (2018); Frédéric Lacroix gallery, Paris (2010); Niāvaran Cultural Center, Tehran (1994); "Behjat Sadr, 33 years of painting", Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris Unesco House, Paris (1990).

Her works can be found in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Minneapolis Museum of Art and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

Sotheby’s are humbled to present two works by the Sadr family in partnership with the Sadr Endowment fund who are committed to preserving and honouring the legacy and history of this formidable artist through various initiatives including the publication of a Catalogue Raisonne which is currently in progress.

If you own a work by the artist, we encourage you to send a request for inclusion of this work in the catalogue raisonne: contact@behjat-sadr.com A certificate of authenticity will be issued after inclusion of the work.