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Monir Shahroudi Farmanfarmayian is a modern artist who has created contemporary art works by using the "Āina-kāri" and "Under Glass Painting" technique. She dropped out of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Tehran and went to New York to continue her education. She studied at Cornell University, the Parsons School of Design, and the student community from 1945 to 1953. After returning to Iran, she exhibited her works in the first Tehran Biennial in 1958 and won an award.
In 1962, she held her first solo exhibition at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Tehran. Since then, she has showcased her paintings and Āina-kāri works many times in Iran and other countries. In 2014, an exhibition of her works was held at the Guggenheim Museum and the permanent museum of Monir Farmanfarmayian was established in 2017 at the Negarestan Museum.
Her early works mainly dealt with the subject of flowers, and from the late 1940s she created geometric designs using mirrors and plaster, based on the mathematical principles of traditional Āina-kāri designs. In the 1991s, she created a collection of wooden boxes in which she mounted her nostalgic photographs, objects and designs.
"Monir's relationship with architecture is very interesting to me," says Frank Stella, a famous American painter and sculptor. The true manifestation of Islamic geometry depends on its use in architectural levels, but Monir has separated it from the wall and basically turned it into its own level. "She has turned geometry, which is essentially dependent on architecture, into an independent level."