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Maryam Salour
Sculptor, Ceramicist, Potter
Iran
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Finished high school in 1973
London, Computer Science Center, 1974–75
Paris, Ecole Superieure des Informatiques, 1975–80
Paris, Khayat Publisher, Started as Calligrapher, Designer
Workshop Superior, 1980–1984
Paris, Academy de Savigny, 1985
Tehran, Started her own workshop, 1987
A Critic on Contemporary Art of Tehran – 8 radio program for BBC world Service, 1999
Young Iranian blind Painters – 2 radio programs for BBC World Service, 1998
Summer Art classes on Ceramic for youth and children, 1997 to present
Individual Exhibitions:
Charbagh, The dream of lost paradise – Tehran, Niavaran Center, 2003
Charbagh, The dream of lost paradise – Isfahan, Contemporary Art Museum, 2003
Charbagh, The dream of lost paradise – Kashan, Ameri’s Family House, 2003
The Angels and the devils – Washington DC SIS (Society of Iranian Studies), 2002
Metamorphosis of Earth, USA, Illinois State University, 2001
Observing the Earth – Tehran, Niavaran Cultural Center, 2001
Anahita Gallery, Tehran, Winter 2000-2001
Niavaran Artistic Creations foundation, Tehran, Winter 2000-2001
Salour Art Workshop, Tehran, Spring 1999
Golestan Art Gallery, Tehran, Spring 1999
Arcade Chauseum Coqe, Genova, Summer 1997
Sad-abad Museum, Spring 1996
French Cultural Service, Tehran, Winter 1994
olestan Art Gallery, Tehran, Spring 1993
Classic Gallery Isfahan, Spring 1992
Golestan Art Gallery, Tehran, Spring 1991
Golestan Art Gallery, Tehran, Winter 1989
Salour Art Workshop, Tehran, Summer 1987
Group Exhibitions:
Sofreh Gallery, Tehran, 2004
Aryan Art Gallery, Tehran, 2002
Gallery Haft Rang, Tehran, 2000-2001
Modern Art Museum, Caracas, Venezuela, 2000
Expo 2000, Hanover, Germany, Spring 2000
Modem Art Museum, Tehran, Winter 1998
Cerf Gallery, Paris, 1997
100 Artists and 100 Works, Golestan Art Gallery, Summer 1993
International Art Fairs (Seyhoun Gallery Art), Summer 1993
Golestan Art Gallery, Tehran, Winter 1992
Modem Art Museum, Tehran Spring 1996
Modem Art Museum, Tehran Spring 1995
Modem Art Museum, Tehran Spring 1994
George Washington University, Washington, DC, Fall 1992
Modem Art Museum, Tehran Summer 1992
Modem Art Museum, Tehran Summer 1988
Museum Purchases:
1Piece: Ceramic Sculpture, The Devil Dreaming of an Angle , Niyavaran Cultural Center, Tehran, 2003
4Pieces: 2 ceramics; 1 Buddha; 1 Earth, “Dirakhtha-yi Afra dar Nimah Shab,” Niyavaran Artistic Creation Foundation, Tehran, 2001
2Pieces: Earth, “ Iran”; Earth, “Raha” ( Liberty); Earth, Untitled , Contemporary Art Museum, Tehran, 2001
Untitled, Ceramic, Fonds Cantonal de Decoration et d’Art , Visual de l’Etat Geneve, 1997
“ Afarinesh 2” (Creation 2), Sculpture, Craft Museum, Tehran , 1995
“ Parvaz” (Fly), Sculpture, Craft Museum, Tehran, 1995
“ Rahayi” (Liberty), Sculpture, 1995
“ Ishraq” (Illumination), Modem Art Museum, Tehran, 1994
Lots of her works of art have been purchased by Iranian , European and American Art Collectors.
Monumental Sculpture:
“ Afarinesh” (Big Bang), Fresco, Iranian Calligraphers Association, Bou Au Cultural Center
“ Zaman” (Time), Sculpture, Iranian Calligraphers Association , Bou All, Cultural Center
The Imaginary Garden: The Visions of the Infinite
a critic by R. Jahanbeglou, 2003
The particularity of an artist is to create her own world. Beyond that, the value and the soundness of Maryam Salour's art is in that it is genuinely a particular universe. This is an autonomous small world that only fleetingly resembles that which we usually know, but which has all its depth, diversion and obscurity. In this respect the Maryam Salour's example remains rare in the contemporary Iranian sculpture. For her, it is no more the question to place only in the mere level of the aesthetic sentiment but to step entirely in a new world through winch we witness directly the mysteries of Personality.
This is especially the image of the Iranian Garden. This expression of lost paradise that torments the mind of Maryam Salour. For her, the everlasting soul of Iran is incarnated in this mystical space where the invisible becomes substance and stone. Here. the artist's work resembles that of the philosopher who, by brewing a multitude of deed, arrives at the concept at the abstract pleasure of un immeasurable definition, something to materialize which is the subjective proof of happiness, and the objective figure of the perpetual beauty.
It is here where the art of Maryam Salour meets the Persian heritage, like the privileged place of the advent of the memory, to establish her own " home" Hence, the progress sentiment metamorphosis which we feel in front of this resurrection of consciousness in the shape of the Persian Garden, and more directly in front of this dialogue with Maryam Salour's style with the fruitfulness of the earth. A communication that is not a hazard, but which is the life of an at itself that discovers immortality.
Considering it as a whole, the art of Maryam Salour appears to us like a poetical action winch begs us to ask about the interior beauty of the elements. It makes us feel life, opens our eyes and makes us realize that the sculpture is quite different from an artful imitation of the exterior reality. That is where the artist asserts herself deeply and naturally as a creator.
Against a world where there exists nothing more than the power of decadence, the art of Maryam Salour appeals to a different form of vision. She views the world by degrees that she produces . To see, for her, is to invite us to see. So, a wave passes and from one side to the other of the mirror, we are born in the world.
The Persian Garden invites us to contemplate, to recognize our perpetual profundity. To Maryam Salour, the call to the memory unites by a mystical communion to the invisible eternity of the Persian soul.
Metamorphoses Of Earthen
a critic by Dariush Shaygan, 2000
translated from French by Minou Moshiri
Maryam Salour is a polyvalent artist. Simultaneously ceramist, sculptor and painter, she incarnates the three: disciplines without confusing them. However, there is no disruption between the three. On the contrary, whether she innovates in the technique of the ceramics by obtaining a blend of unusual colures, or when in sculpture she projects delicate forms resulting from resulting from antagonistic or complementary forces, or when in painting she imitates the ruggedness of the mineral nature to create what she personally describes as "the four cornered dream," we witness the multiple metamorphoses of the earth itself. The earth, which at times turns into the turquoise blue of the skies of Persia; at other times embraces the ethereal shape of the bird woman; or again becomes the rough surface of panels when the artist, in a dream like fashion, turns her attention to stones in order to unveil the essence of those high chain of mountains overhanging the oases of the Iranian plateau.
It was in France at the Savigny Academy that she was initiated to the art of ceramics. But from her early apprenticeship she reveals her hidden nostalgia for her country of birth. All the images of her prim oral childhood: the white summits of the high mountains, the murmurs of the little cascades flowing into limpid basins, the blue domes which rival with the azure of the sky, already impregnate her inner vision of art. And that is why Mme de Savigny tells her one day: " Maryam, whatever you do, you shall remain the girl who belongs to the country of the blue domes."
In her sculptures, this tendency to abstract the quintessence flourishes in space. The predominant from become the complementarily of opposite forces, the dual nature of the Angel Satan, of androgyny. As an example, her sculpture entitled "Day and Night where two slender and ecstatic figures unite like a two headed tree, like two entangled branches shooting out of a common trunk whose roots and deeply in the abyss of the earth. Or that woman who springs weightless, in a trance, to the heights where she can lose herself in the stardust, as if the artist wanted to sublimate matter through the alchemy of her vision.
All the statuettes have triangular faces, as though by opposing the three angles, the triangle would constitute the restless dynamism of creation itself. That is why the omnipresence of the negating principle, or Satan, who projects a halo, so to speak, around the work of art, is rather like an occult power. Because the devil is not the fallen angel, nor is he damned, but on the contrary, he is the attracting force of love. He has been degraded from his privileged position because of his excessive love; it is his immoderation, the exclusivity of his irrepressible desire, his rebellion to all unconditional commands, which have been the cause of his death and damnation. He is the force, which animates the universe, which gives warmth to the cold stars of the constellations. In Maryam Salour's opinion, Satan and Angel have interchangeable roles. Like, for example, in the figure of that Angel Satan adorned with fan shaped wings springing out of its body like some incomplete growth, like some draft apt to assume the dual nature of future incarnations.
The transition from sculpture to painting takes palace without shock or break, because even her paintings are paintings sculptures. They occasionally assume the appearance of a large and ancient rock, which bars the road, yet invites to go beyond. We find that same desire for dizzy heights as in the sculptures. A desire for rarefied space in the heights. Just as Maryam Salour innovated in the art of ceramics, here too she creates new cocktails, unusual mixture made up of papier mâchér, crushed wood, colorful pigments. Mixtures which give the surface of her thick canvasses roughness, windings, and stripes which plough this mineral world. It is like being confronted with a dream turned into stone of geological sedimentations, as though by concentrating her vision, she goes up to the origin of chthonian forces prior to the multiform explosion of life which modified and enriched the natural scene of evolution.
To end, I might add that in the work of this original artist, one can study all the geological layers of the earth's memory, layers describing, stage by stage, the palimpsest of the historical legend of the reign of minerals and reaching its apotheosis in that frail figure of the bird women before us like a "misunderstood sphinx", and who tells us with the poet (Beudelaire): "I am beautiful, ye mortals, like a dream of stone".
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