dideh: biography

Gholam Hossein Nami was born in Qom in 1926. At the age of eleven, he took up painting as a pastime without focusing on any particular style. He became acquainted with the academic principles and methods of painting at the College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran. There he began practicing and experimenting in this craft more seriously, eventually learning the fundamental differences between an objective conceptualization of nature and artistic creativity.

While studying at the college, Nami held part-time jobs teaching painting to primary-school children. His art was deeply influenced by this direct relationship with the emotions and feelings of the innocent world of children and their transparent mentality. He developed, for example, a strong tendency towards bright, joyful childlike colors. This inclination, however, was not to last long and was soon replaced by a predilection for the color white and later for three-dimensional paintings. Nami went to the United States in 1978 to further his education, and it was there that he produced his best three-dimensional works for his master's thesis. Some of these works are on display in the Milwaukee City Museum and the Art Collection of the University of Wisconsin.

Nami produced white and three-dimensional paintings for eighteen years, recognizing the existing possibilities and limitations. He aimed at creating a visual system that would promote his paintings' formal strengths through the potential force of their mild colors. This form of painting was a result of his search within himself, a sort of silent dialogue with his soul that led to the creation of images depicting the survival of that soul.

Alongside these experiments, Nami tested other techniques, becoming a more dexterous painter. Using nature as inspiration, he tried to present his paintings' surfaces so as to imply the existence of an original, fundamental reality beneath. His conceptualization of this hidden reality had its roots in his constant reflection over natural forms, which is why he was more anxious about the structural logic of his works than the symbols of nature that served as his paintings' models and inspirations.

Upon his return to Iran, he displayed a collection of his works entitled "The Death Paintings." At this point in his career, he had accepted death as an undeniable part of human destiny and painted human beings as the remains of a machine that had lost its mechanical features following a metamorphosis, thus becoming more organic. He used familiar artistic raw materials and symbolism because he had resolved not to allow any form of irrational interpretation and feeling within his works; these paintings are overwhelmed with silence, death, torture and screams and their echoes in the atmosphere. Nami's perspective was categorically pessimistic and despondent in these works. Yet in the chaotic world in which we are living, it is ignorance of bitter realities rather than such gloomy pessimism that deserves reproach.

Since 1991 Gholam Hossein Nami has turned to new experiments, allowing himself to float freely where the wind of emotion would take him. In several paintings he experimented in a profoundly mental manner with the concept of walls. One of the fundamental elements in Nami's works is light, which he employs as the spatial dimension that secures the unity and harmony of the whole image.

Ali Asghar Gharebaghi

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