Parvineh Etemadi (Iranian, b. 1947)

After a period of painting abstracts, Parvineh Etemadi began her second phase in 1968, a series of paintings executed on a rough cement base, mainly still lifes, employing a minimum of lines and colour. Whilst formally they draw inspiration from Japanese woodcuts, their subjects- plants, bottles, pots, and the occasional recognizable detritus from the twentieth century- give these works a sense of the familiar but also de-particularized, unrelated to a specific time or place. There is something almost platonic about the objects in these pictures, each of which seem more an archetype or idea of an object, rather than actual or observed. Paintings from this series rarely appear on the market. Combining both the human figure and still life elements, the present lot is a particularly unusual example.