The Man of True and Just
Measure in Communication
Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi was born in Tehran in 1937. Laureate of the Paris Biennale in 1961, he settled in Paris that same year, then opened a second studio in New York.
As early as 1957, at the age of twenty, he asserted an artistic stance and conceptual choices of his own, and the singularity of his approach earned him international recognition. His Saqqa Khaneh1 works (1957 to 1965) gave their name to a movement of which he is the founder and which remains a reference point of the avant-garde. Laureate of the Tehran (1960), Venice (1962) and São Paulo (1963) Biennales, he was championed by critics such as Frank Elgar, Pierre Cabanne and Pierre Restany. In 1963, MoMA acquired K+L+32+H+4, Mon père et moi (My Father and I, 1962). In 1972, a survey of art critics conducted by Connaissance des arts placed him among the ten major living artists, alongside Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Zao Wou-Ki.
His works are held in numerous public collections: MoMA (New York), British Museum (London), Centre Pompidou and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, TMoCA (Tehran), Mathaf (Doha). They are regularly presented at international modern and contemporary art fairs and auctions.
Zenderoudi’s work is protean. He develops autonomous corpora in parallel, with no hierarchy between them, which answer one another through conceptual interference. Within the works, the same freedom applies to every plastic element, whether geometric form, iconographic unit, mathematical element or space of colour. None is fixed in advance; its status depends on the relations it maintains within the field. His research thus unfolds, corpus after corpus, beyond any label: as early as 2000, in his preface to the retrospective at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Pierre Restany set aside the reading of the work as an “East-West synthesis”, saw in it an imperative of universal communication, and in Zenderoudi2 “the man of true and just measure in communication”.
Zenderoudi pursues his research today, every day, in the studio.
Translation. Only the original French version is authoritative.
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