One of the most widely recognized forms of Persian art is so-called miniature painting, a tradition that the contemporary Iranian artist Farah Ossouli borrows from and updates. Ossouli appropriates iconic artworks such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, and Eddie Adam’s photograph of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner, which she then translates into her own style of contemporary miniature painting that recalls the Safavid period (1501-1722). In this work, Michelangelo, Ahmad and I, Ossouli transforms Michelangelo’s fresco of the creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel but here Adam is depicted as a crowned warrior reaching out to touch the finger of a woman who supplants Michelangelo’s God the Father. The lines of text that frame the scene are excerpts from poetry by Ahmad Shamloo, a contemporary Iranian poet. Through this mingling of tradition and modernity, East and West, Ossouli refreshes the traditional art of miniature painting for the present day.
Ossouli received her B.A. from the Department of Fine Arts, Tehran University, Iran in 1977. Following the revolution, she remained in Iran and turned to creating miniatures that addressed modern-day social issues, such as gender politics. Her work is in the collections of the Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, among many others.
