dideh: Koorosh Shishegaran: biography

Fereshteh Yamini-Sharif was born in 1960 to a Tehran family that was very much involved with literature and art. Thus she grew up with poetry in her childhood, encouraging her to write poems and stories herself.

She became interested in painting at the age of thirteen without having had any kind of prior education in the visual arts. When she was nineteen, she began studying art seriously, attending Nima Petgar’s workshop. Later she gave painting lessons to children.

Yamini-Sharif believes that poetry and painting are part of an integrated domain-that both seek the same goal while portraying the same story. In this way, her painting touches her poetry and vice versa. Her works bear two significant features: an emphasis on aesthetic beauty through an exaggerated use of color, and an obvious adherence to simple yet elegant compositions. Her paintings are made attractive by their tone and character, which manifest themselves prior to the identification of the concept and the elements of the painting itself. Therefore, the character and tone of her works are never subordinate to the realization and interpretation of the concept. At first sight it may seem that only one thing is happening in a Yamini-Sharif work, but upon closer examination this seemingly simple event becomes multidimensional and multifaceted.

Yamini-Sharif is involved with the same issue that many a painter and draftsman since Cézanne has been engaged with, that is, the illusionary nature of the lines that distinguish a shape from the space around it and at the same time specify the distance of the scene’s elements from the spectator. In some cases, she may decide to fade or to emphasize these lines.

Some of her paintings depict familiar symbols, lending such works an air of symbolism. A bird, for example, may be traced implicitly or seen very openly in a number of her pictures.Yet it would be wrong to assume that the bird in Yamini-Sharif’s art acts as a mere symbol of, say, flight to another world or freedom; rather, it provides an image through which one can go on thinking about anything from a familiar poem to a solitary dialogue to the process of painting itself.

The images that Yamini-Sharif creates are, in other words, mostly visual rather than symbolic. Although she employs symbolic images that correspond to entities in the external world, her external references are, in fact, similar to a mental index in search of meaning-they do not adopt a specific paradigm. Even when she is illustrating Ahoora (God) and Ahriman (Evil) as symbols of good and vice, she does not wish the viewer to submerge in illusionary meditations and dreams. Instead, she wants her spectators to feel as if they are staring at something beyond their presuppositions and narcissistic engagements.

Ali Asghar Gharebaghi

One-man exhibitions:

Group exhibitions: