Pariyoush Ganji

Background

Pariyoush Ganji’s life has been woven with art since a very young age. She is born in 1945, in Tabriz, Iran. In 1948, Ganji’s family moved to Tehran. When she was 12, she participated in an art competition, which brought her success in her district. That was when she was determined to study art. Moreover, her father was an inspiration to her to learn about textile design for his career as a textile designer. Pariyoush Ganji was a classmate with several legendary figures such as Bahman Mohassess, Ahmad Shamloo, Sohrab Sepehri, and Gholamhossein Sa’edi. That was when the artistic movements were at the peak in Iran.

Education

In high school, when her art teacher recognized Ganji's talent, she was encouraged to enroll in art school for further education. She completed a formal art education first, at the Girls' School of Fine Arts, majoring in painting. There, Reza Firouzi mentored her. Also, she was a student of Mahmoud Farshchian, who is famous for his work of Iranian miniature. Then, she went to England to learn more at London's art institutions, participate in St. Martin's School of Fine Arts' classes, and take art programs at the Sir John Cass Art School. After that, she went to Chelsea School of Fine arts in 1970 and graduated after three years.

Work

Pariyoush Ganji started by selling her works before going to Chelsea School of Fine arts. She worked on The Safavid Tiles of Isfahan as her thesis, which is inspired by original designs and paintings of Iranian art. Then, she sold some of her designs to several textile-printing factories. She traveled to Germany in 1974, where she was hired as a designer for Dura Tufing GMBH. As she was in close contact with expressionist painters, she brought fresh visions to her designs. That was an opportunity for her as well to expand her skills and techniques. In 1975, Ganji moved to France and took a course at Ecole de Beaux Art in Paris. She worked on “the kinetic movement of esoteric arabesque designs of Persian carpets, inspired by the dancing human form”. After she returned to Iran, in 1976, she collaborated with the center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults as well as curating an exhibition of their paintings and illustrating a book. Ganji traveled abroad many times. She was married and had two kids before she went back to Iran to teach. It was 1986 when she taught at many art schools in Tehran. She researched on the visual art of Far East, to find the influential elements of Sassanid Patterns on Japanese visual art through the Silk Road. Pariyoush Ganji has been teaching in many places such as AL-Zahra University, Azad University, and Tehran University. Also, she has been a member in organizations such as Tehran Cultural Heritage Organization, Contemporary Arts Museum, Tehran’s Jury Memberships Contemporary Drawing, Handicrafts, and Tourism Organization. “All throughout her career as a painter, Pariyoush Ganji has spontaneously expressed her love for life, faith in the power of hope and emotional and urbane awareness with an artistic knack. Her expressionist language lacks the sentimental eruption of the early 20th century expressionists. Instead, it is full of emotions intermingled with knowledge and experience realized in her unique painterly language through an intuitional process”. The Cultural Foundation of Japan invited Pariyoush Ganji to Japan in 1996, to work on the influences of Iranian patterns on Japanese textiles. She stayed there for six months. Then, after one year, she worked on a series, which is called Red. Red, a series of painting with red on black backgrounds, were created by Ganji’s social surroundings. In the early 2000s, Ganji started working on Night Windows that replaced red with purple. Night Windows are described to be new ways to historical occurrences to show the light through the darkness shaped by the many layers of purple. She then continued to work on other series called Roses, Day Windows, and Water, each with a different and continual direction for “searching the light".

Exhibitions

Pariyoush Ganji’s work has been exhibited around the world. She has had around twenty exhibitions and some of her paintings are an important part of the collections in Japan, United Kingdom, and the United States. Throughout the four periods of Ganji’s work, Ganji’s paintings have been exhibited not only in Iran, but also in England, Japan, USA, Germany, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabi, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Uzbekistan, and Switzerland.

Inspirations

Although Ganji has been developing her artistic research and study in countries other than Iran, she has kept her cultural intake throughout her artistic journey as well as representing it in her artistic language. Her school years at Behzad Art Academy that she went to from 1963 to 1966 played an important role to shape her inspirations. She kept her routes of Persian culture even when she went to London and Paris to study, from 1968 to 1975. When she traveled to Japan in 1996, she learned about a Japanese technique called Sumi-e ink and mastered it. That was when she produced some paintings that were “blends of minimal Japanese Shojis and ornamental Persian windows”.

Awards

“Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun”

Conclusion

Pariyoush Ganji states about her creative process that: “I observe everything through windows. I look from the inside and the outside of a window, searching for light in the darkness. Thus, I am not on the inside nor the outside. I see myself through the window. I try to discover the silence that travels through the layers of shadow. At the deepest of each layer, I find an expanding calm. Sounds will disturb it. The space of silence is dynamic, it is airy, it breathes. It does not let itself be disturbed. It catches my movements and the silence becomes visual. Sounds might surround me. I do not hear them. My windows free up quietness from within me. This silence reveals the purity and profoundness of life”.