dideh: biography

Nami Petgar was born in Tehran in 1945. As a young child he painted and drew in the workshop of his father and uncle, who were famous painters of their day. He was first inspired by the realistic paintings of his teachers, and later gained remarkable skills in portrait painting. By the age of twenty, he had become expert in oil-painting techniques and had acquired enough experience to start his own workshop and classes in Tehran.

Working on his own, Petgar abandoned traditional and conventional painting styles studying various different approaches, including impressionism and Postimpressionism. Yet he failed to find any one style an ideal visual means of expressing his immediate environment. He took no interest in the artistic mainstream of the day, i.e. modernism, and considered the academic art schools’ painting courses deceptive and misleading. Petgar’s main ambition was to study the folk arts of Iran and depict the nomad women’s colorful clothing, cradles and kilims. He also wanted to paint the landscapes of his vast country. His studies extended well beyond Western painting styles and techniques to Oriental and Indian schools of painting. Through his family’s acquaintance with poets, writers and musicologists, Petgar developed an interest in literature and mysticism, wishing to conglomerate these in his paintings as well.

In 1966 Petgar set out on a five-year field study all over Iran learning about Iranian folk art and handicrafts. He painted some of his findings and published the rest in journals of art and culture, then left for Europe to visit museums and find out more about Western art.

Upon his return, he produced a series of landscape paintings of mountains and deserts illustrating all his technical and theoretical discoveries. He wanted his paintings to be as unique as his fingerprints in representing his own character and identity. Meanwhile, he was experimenting with symbolic images such as trees, sky, curtains, windows, women, cloth, birds, books, musical instruments, etc. To Petgar these elements from daily life also carry spiritual and aesthetic symbolism. For instance, the portrait of a woman depicted with an overwhelming sense of her own mystery is the symbol of both a human and an angel, of beauty and love, silence and patience, life and death.

Since 1981 Nami Petgar has been acquainted with one of the prominent international figures of mysticism, J. Krishna Murti. From Murti he has learned a great deal about self-knowledge and artistic creation.

Ali Asghar Gharebaghi

One-man exhibitions:

Group exhibitions: