Youth
Bijan Nemati Sharif was born on Dec. 17th, 1947 in the city of Shahi (GhaemShahr) in Mazandaran province by the Caspian Sea in Iran. He was the third from three brothers and one sister.
While still an infant, his father was transferred to work at the iron works in Karaj*, where they lived for a while. Later his father took a job at the Planning and Budget Bureau and the family moved to Tehran in the Hassan-Abad neighborhood.
“My father was a serious self-made man. He lost both parents early in life and at the age of 13, he raised his younger siblings on his own. He stopped school in the sixth grade and began to work for the government. Soon after, he began studying English at the Iranian-American Society, and was promoted from an ordinary clerk to a managerial position.”
“In his home, we were free to do as we pleased, since he spent most of his time outside the home.What time we came home or what time we went out weren’t very important. This freedom meant I could roam our neighborhood and the nearby neighborhoods, as well as the bazaars and also play marbles and football and other street games. I learned about Tehran from an early age, and about its large variety of people. I loved the cinema and went to see all the films at the Mihan Theater near our home. Sometimes, I went with friends to the LalezarTheater. I even kept a diary of the films I had seen and jotted down the plot and some notes about them. I remember that Mihan Theater didn’t have seats and instead people sat on large square tins that were filled with plaster. There was always an intermission and it was possible to buy one ticket and watch the same film all day long until the theater closed. People came and went as they pleased, they spoke during the film and had lemonade and sunflower seeds and sandwiches that were sold there. These are nostalgic moments from my childhood that have stayed with me. Wandering around town aimlessly was therapeutic for me and I can see that this still affects my work.”
Most of my early schooling was at Sadr Elementary School on Eskandari Street. These were my days of long walks and I studied just enough to pass my tests and make my family happy and receive their blessing.
“One of his elder brother’s friends, who was a big reader, turned Bijan on to reading. He started reading stories and tales from books and magazines. When his father was transferred to Loshan to manage the cement factory there, his mother and siblings stayed in Tehran and Bijan went with his father to Loshan. He stayed there for his sixth and seventh years of school. In Loshan, he learned about solitude and quiet. It was as if time passed slower than usual. In the virgin nature surrounding Loshan, he began to enjoy youthful exploration as well as honing his day-dreaming skills. Solitude and exploration led him to poetry and he began to write poems. After this, reading and writing poetry became a large part of his life. He also began to paint. He wrote his poetry in a notebook and he filled the margins and empty spaces with drawings.
When he returned to Tehran he attended the Honarbakhsh High school from the 8th until the 11th grade. He says, “My puppet-making began exactly at this time. I was first influenced by Abbas Mehrpooya, a pop singer, decorator and puppet-maker and more. He remembers puppets by Mehrpooya that were made to hang from automobile rear-view mirrors. Such as a Mexican with sombrero carved into wood attached to a wooden cross. Of course, striped cloth from the public baths were used as clothing to add color. I began to copy these puppets and sell them.”
“I also learned to make netting from someone who had learned it in prison, and I used this to add to the puppets that I was making. I would place small nails in the head of a puppet and then take a hook to connect wires to it. In this way, my previous puppets took on a unique new life. Not long after this, I learned a new way to make puppets. I would take equal lengths of wool. One side was held by wires and I attached a drill to the other side. When I turned on the drill the wool was twisted into a cylindrical shape that facilitated the making of more puppets of different types and shapes.”
“But in fact, I actually began professional puppet-making the day I saw an ad for a puppet-making job in the newspaper. I followed up on the ad and found myself at a workshop on Naderi Avenue. Two university students who ran the workshop started by asking me complicated questions about painting. Fortunately, I had just read the book Moulin Rouge,the biography of Toulouse Lautrec, and I was able to ace this interview and I started work for 50 rials a day. There were a few others working there. We would make large puppets and cover them with sheepskin and filled them with cotton. The decorative parts and especially adding the eyes was left to me.”
“When I was around 18 years old I met one of the teachers at the School for the Deaf. He ordered a number of puppets from me and I used plywood, plaster and strips of gunnysack to fill the order. Eventually these puppets reappeared at the Baghcheban school.1”
After receiving his high school diploma, Bijan was accepted to the University of Tehran’s Fine Arts’ sculpture department in 1968. Among his professors, we can name; Parviz Tanavoli, ArdeshirArzhang (He studied in Italy and did mostly busts and portraits.) NahidSaliani, Parviz Kalantari, MortezaMomayez and Mirfendreski.
He also was classmates with Mohammad Ali Madadi, NayereTaghavi and MihanNoormah. He has this to say regarding those years. “I found my way into Tanavoli’s class from my freshman year and I started working for him. But overall, I didn’t find my studies at the university very interesting. I was an anti-academic and didn’t fit well with the university’s disciplinary system which had Professor Seyhoon in charge back then. Therefore, I didn’t take my classes very seriously. I put my hours in at the work studios just enough to get by and I didn’t attend any theory classes. During these years, I concentrated on poetry. Heavy poems full of feeling. This lasted for a few years after university.”
He continued making puppets during his university years. He made a large number of wooden and cloth puppets. “In those days there was a popular doll from Europe that was filled with sand and made from corduroy cloth. I used felt instead of corduroy and instead of sand, I used birdseed. This turned out to be a frog that was as slimy as a real frog, and it actually felt like a real frog.All of these things became my experiences and stayed with me in my memories, and later on I incorporated all these ideas that reflected in my work.”2
Theatrical Puppets
After he finished his university, Nemati Sharif went to do his compulsory military duty in 1973. When his military service ends, he is hired by the Center for the Intellectual Development of Child and Adolescent. He marries in 1976 and his children Roozbeh and Behrooz are from this marriage. From this point on, most of the puppets he made were for entertainment purposes, but he soon began to focus on theatrical puppets for children, and for this reason he needed to get more experience. He says, “Theater is diverse and magical. The puppets are the connection between the puppeteers and the audience. Therefore, they must be built in a way for the puppeteer to express their feelings, spirit and experience through the puppet. They have to be easy to work with. After this, puppet-making was no longer as widespread as it had been for me.”
“I began this job with a lot of experimentation. Before I was hired by the Center, a Czech artist named Oscar Veld, who worked in the Dramatic Arts department, had made puppets for some of the plays, one of them being An Accident in Puppet Land. They were fantastic puppets and were kept in the Center’s storage rooms. I looked them over and figured out the materials and the manner they were made; sponges, papier-mâché and clay. I knew I would be successful at making moving puppets by immersing myself into the art. ‘This evolution has to take place first in our soul, so it can pass through to our puppets through us’. Watching puppet plays that the Center put on every year, foreign puppeteers coming for festivals and working with them, all this widened my horizons.
When I had first been hired at the Center, Don Lafoon asked me to make masks of Greek gods for one of his plays. Madame Butterfly was another play I helped with in this same way. In this play, a Walt Disney designer did all of the set and wardrobe design and it was beautiful. I was given the task of building the scenery; things such as two meter long shoes and giant matches and a giant match box…”
Gradually, Bijan Nemati Sharif professional activities went beyond puppet-making for theater, and on to set design for plays put on by the Center, as well as City Hall, Radio and TV and other venues.
At the time of the revolution and after, he continued his work until he retired from the Center. By this time he had created a number of puppets. About this he says,
“I worked non-stop on puppet-making for about 25 years. I was able to complete 58 projects that each had a minimum of ten puppets and each project lasted for a few months. Some of these projects were; Grandfather and the Radish, Workshop (Parts one and two), Rabbit School, The Travels of Green in Green, The Curious Crow, Six Crows and One Fox and many more. I also did set design for theater productions such as; The Bald Pigeoneer, An Eye for an Eye, The Little Bear, Kuroghlu and more. I also worked with many people, such as; BehrouzGharibpour, AtashTaghipour, GholamhosseinLotfi, EsmailPourreza and others. After the revolution, I spent time reconstructing antique puppets that had been destroyed and worn out and was successful in reviving some of them.”
Cooperation with the Constructive Education Center and rebuilding folk puppets from designs created by Parviz Kalantari for this same purpose, was another of Bijan’s activities at this time. He reconstructed a large number of puppets for a collector who had collected them on his travels around the world and which had been extremely damaged in the flooding of north Tehran’s Tajrish neighborhood.This was another of Bijan’s activities.
Before Bijan Nemati Sharif entered the field of sculpture he began to paint seriously in 1990. He had an inner necessity to follow this path. In the past, when he was in college, he connected with the Ghandriz Gallery and during his connection with the gallery, he was influenced by the paintings he saw there.
“I attended the exhibitions and became influenced by the geometric and abstract works at the gallery and I began experimenting.”
When he began to make theatrical puppets, he put aside many other activities, for years. He found it very interesting and it led him to put aside his other endeavors. But he eventually began to paint and sculpt.
“When I left the field of puppet-making and entered into sculpting, my skills I had learned in puppet-making were a great help to me. So, when I began building three-dimensional forms, it resultedin me building skillfully crafted pieces. But I quickly learned that in these raised formed, skill and technique are a precursor to the work. Picasso said the opposite with his statement that expertise should not be visible in art. So, I moved on to painting. During my school years, due to my disdain of academics, I never learned to draw, and later on I never attempted to master drawing. Despite my weakness in drawing, I began to express my inner self on canvas. The result was something that many called graphic design that was quick to get its meaning across, and some called it a kind of pop art. But in my opinion, they were a type of gutsiness, and I enjoyed this bravado. I didn’t think my work was flawed, and I didn’t listen to the opinions of others. This type of autonomy worked in my favor since it kept me from being held back by some restrictive deconstructive criticisms, and I was able to go about my work freely. Gradually, my work left the labels of pop art and graphic design behind and they became more bitter and expressionistic.”
Bijan Nemati Sharif worked on a large number of paintings, mostly in larger dimensions and he finished many from 1990 until 1996. These textured, bas-relief paintings were exhibited at the Aria Gallery in 1996.
In his bas-reliefs, paintings and later on his sculptures, despite using bright colors, from the very first of his works, there was always a bitter sarcasm to be found. Over time, his paintings took on clear characteristics, such as; large perspectives, compositions difficult to concentrate on, thick dark outlines around figures, quick crooked brushstrokes and surfaces, flat bright colors alongside colors that faded into perspective.
After the Iran-Iraq war ended (1980-1988) and we Iranians were able to go back to our lives, Bijan Nemati Sharif believed we were not yet free of the nightmare of war and he expressed this in his work with horror and destruction and shadows.
Nemati Sharif held his second one-man show in 1997 at the Bamdad Gallery. Many differences could be seen in this new collection of his work. This include thick outlines, choice of color, doing away with the wide open spaces of the past and instead a virtual closeness to the objects in such a way that these objects or object took over the whole canvas. He incorporated the expression of the elements to help emphasize the bitterness of the subject matter.
“Boxes of ammunition, over-turned hospital beds, crumbling buildings and destruction throughout the environment all spoke to the destruction of war.
Nemati Sharif, in relation to his experiences, speaks about this exhibition, “I sincerely honor and respect the heritage and accomplishments of modern art and every step taken in this direction gives me joy and ecstasy. And because of this, I endeavor to be part of any such innovations.”3
He also said, “My biggest influences have been Henri Rousseau and Fernand Leger. His strong imagination and seemingly unskilled hand attracted me to Rousseau early on and later on the pseudo-graphic designs of Leger’s work. In connection with painting, Filip Gaston played a small part, too and in respect to sculpture, I was influenced by Jean Dubuffet for a very short time. Although I never saw more than a couple pieces by Niki de Saint Phalle, I accept that she influenced my work. In the earlier critiques of my style, I was compared mostly to Hugo Ball, even though all I knew about him was that he was a Dadaist poet and I had never seen any of his work. Some compare me to Wesselman and Rosenquist. But, I negate this comparison completely. But I can state that at present, what I am influenced by is the aesthetics and pluralism present in post-modernistic art.
In an article about Nemati Sharif’s second exhibition we read,
“All of Bijan Nemati Sharif’s canvases are personal takes on life. A fox chases a rooster. A squirrel is attached to the flames of a fire, an exhaust pipe, the hands and feet of a person climbing a tower… none of these paintings seek to be controversial, but invite the audience to ponder. Shapes and images have been drawn in the most abstract manner yet we can still recognize the most mundane ordinary items when we break the images down.”5
The special characteristics of Nemati Sahrif’s work in his second one-man show, are a continuity of his previous paintings that he exhibited on a yearly basis. He uses simplicity, brevity and wide, quickly brushed borders with dark colors while using overall bright colors in his textured large-scale works.”
“I went through a twenty year period of making puppets which was separate from painting. Before that, to begin painting and sculpting I did create some academic works. I never learned to draw, and it was because of this that I went toward painting. Many characteristics have found their way from puppet-making into my painting. Things such as bright colors and sarcasm, but much more varied than that. Puppet theater has a dramatic side and it can be filled with sarcasm which made its way into my work. As an example, in my first paintings if I wanted to show two lizards attacking a flower, I would use the lizards from the packaging for Gillette razor blades that actually attacked the flower from atop a razor blade. I found this type of sarcasm interesting, and something that also exists in pop-art.”
NematLalei, in his notes on painting, explains Nemati Sharif this way; “The advantage that the paintings of Bijan Nemati Sharif have is they are neither personal, nor attractive, nor were they learned academically. One could say that these paintings cannot be pleasant, that they are bitter and so on ad infinitum, but my dear friends, do not forget that art for entertainment’s sake, art made to decorate the environment and to bring pleasant feeling to the audience or to impress them, is neither independent nor free, and is therefore no longer art.”
Nemati Sharif says, “My recent work, compared to what I did at first, are very different, even though you can still sense the footsteps of my past in them. But I believe that if in the beginning I was seeking a language with which to express myself, in my recent work I have achieved a special personalized language and I have found my special world. From the beginning I struggled to enter my personal world. But now I seem to be riding the waves which are taking me any which way they see fit.”
Sculpture
Nemati Sharif retired in 2003. In his final years at the Center, he takes up sculpturing seriously and in the first sculptures he makes, we can see how they were influenced by his painting and puppet making.
“I began with bas-relief designs that I painted in colors. I cannot accept sculptures without color, and this comes from the puppets that I created. My sculptures are something between painting and sculpture. This type of creation is not unheard of in Europe and America. My sculptures, like my paintings, are expressions of my inner self. Things that I have been attracted to at various times in my life. In order to express my leanings and tendencies in my painting and sculpture, I would present my idea with a few simple lines. While I am working, I can clearly visualize the finished product, but without color. I add color at the end of the creative process in a completely improvised manner.”
HeliaDarabi, in an article about an exhibition of Nemati Sharif’s sculptures at the Asr Gallery in 2008, wrote, “The sculptures in this exhibition can be divided into three groups; abstract, semi-abstract and decorative. Yet despite these groups being different, they share a mood brought out through bright colors, simplified shapes and childlike designs in Nemati Sharif’s sculptures. They are bound by a child’s colorful world, sweet dreams and illustrations from animation. The artist’s background in puppet-making appears in the forms he creates, and comparing his work to a childish world is a superficial and premature view and judgment. Contrasting these unconnected elements is wrong, and comparing his monstrous cat to Heathcliff is untrue, and the cut-off arms of a doll by a flag or the outstretched bloody hand of a child, are much more horrific than what can be found in a child’s fantasy world. There is no way that I can imagine that a child could imagine to have created this or connect with it, and I am sure they would only be frightened by them.”6
Roozbeh, Bijan’s son, explains his father’s routine as such,
“Every morning, he wakes up early, takes his tape recorder in his hand and goes to his studio wearing clothes spotted with paints and stained with color. His studio is by the parking garage and is approximately 25 meters square and is under our apartment. In such a space, he has created hundreds of works of art. He is profoundly in love with classical music and those who have known him remember this as one of his special characteristics. As you walk through the parking garage, you can hear a Verdi opera, or symphonies by Beethoven or Mahler, Mozart’s Magic Flute and his workshop instantly is transformed into a large concert hall. He satiates his solitude with music. His workshop is always packed with artwork, music and color. When he returns home at noon, he rests a few hours after lunch and then returns to his workshop and continues to work until the early morning hours.
He also had a unique way of using materials in his artwork. He would begin by creating miniature sketches for his sculptures with beeswax, and then after scrutinizing these miniatures and planning out their final sizes, he would begin the creation process. First came a plastic-foam skeleton which he stabilized with cloth and wood glue. Then came plaster and cement which he scraped and sanded and shaped and smoothed over to paint with acrylics or oil paints. For his outdoor sculptures, he substituted fiberglass which he fortified and made longer-lasting by covering it with a shiny coat of epoxy. In this way, he ended up with light-weight sculptures that were easy and quick to build, easily transported and had minimal maintenance.”
After seven years of battling brain cancer, Bijan Nemati Sharif closed his eyes for the last time to this gray world on August 15, 2012 and left behind a world of color.
