Parastou Forouhar

About the Book

The Iranian artist Parastou Forouhar expresses her reaction to the perplexing situations in her homeland through a wide variety of techniques, from photography to digital drawings and multi-media installations.

This is the first English-language monograph on her work, published on the occasion of her first solo show in the UK at Leighton House Museum in London.  With essays by curator and film-maker Lutz Becker and author and critic Russell Harris, this publication presents a selection of the most startling highlights of Forouhar’s work so far – created in response to the dramatic social and political upheaval that she experienced after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the murder of her parents in Tehran.

Though the inspiration behind Forouhar’s subject matter may be tragic, her work has a great emotional range: the results are sometimes macabre, occasionally darkly humorous and often purely joyful.

About the Contributors

Rose Issa is a curator and writer who has championed visual art and film from the Arab world and Iran for nearly 30 years. Her gallery, Rose Issa Projects, showcases the best in upcoming and established artists from the Arab world and Iran.

→ Author Website

About the Artist

Parastou Forouhar was born in 1962 in Tehran, and since 1991 has lived and worked in Germany. She received her BA in Art from the University of Tehran (1990) and her MA from the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Germany (1994).

Reviews

‘Forouhar draws on a large reservoir of Iranian cultural forms and uses them to create pieces with great lyrical content.’
Russell Harris

‘Her response to the horrors of our times gives her work purpose and energy … In her depiction of everyday mental and physical brutality, she creates images of aesthetic appeal but disturbing ambiguity.’
Lutz Becker