Moderna Museet opens the first Nordic retrospective of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: «Tehran/New York» with nearly 100 works

Moderna Museet in Stockholm opened on Saturday the exhibition «Tehran/New York», the first retrospective of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian in the Nordic countries, as ArtDaily reports. Around one hundred works, from the 1970s to the 2010s, gather in one place the famous kaleidoscopic mirror mosaics, collages, botanical drawings, carpets, calligraphic works and the autobiographical boxes the artist called «Heartache Boxes».

The exhibition, curated by Asrin Haidari and organised in collaboration with Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Kunstmuseum Den Haag, will afterwards travel to Madrid (13 April – 30 August 2027) and to The Hague (autumn 2027 / spring 2028). The illustrated catalogue is published in four languages — Swedish, English, Spanish and Dutch.

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1922–2019), born in Qazvin, Iran, first studied at the University of Tehran and in 1945 moved to New York, where she entered avant-garde circles — she met Joan Mitchell, Robert Morris and Andy Warhol before they became famous. She returned to Tehran in 1957 and took part in the first Tehran Biennial and in the Venice Biennale in 1958. A visit in 1966 to the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz, whose walls are clad with mirror fragments in geometric patterns, marked the turning point in her work: the artist took the mirror mosaic (ayeneh-kari) from architecture and brought it into reliefs and sculptural objects.

After the 1979 revolution she lived for about 25 years in exile in New York, where she returned to smaller collages and drawings; in the early 2000s she returned permanently to Tehran and, with the help of master craftsmen, entered one of the most productive periods of her career. International recognition came with the retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2015; in 2017 the Monir Museum opened in Tehran, the first museum in Iran dedicated to a woman artist.

The central work of the Stockholm exhibition is «Third Family» (2011), a series of mirror reliefs in which geometric forms develop through repetition. Curator Asrin Haidari says the work of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian makes visible the connections and exchanges that have long remained outside the dominant narratives of modern art history — an artist who today is considered among the most influential figures of Iranian art and who has a firm place in global modernism.