Pariyoush Ganji is an Iranian painter. Her work is influenced by traditional Persian art and culture. Pariyoush Ganji currently lives in Tehran.
Early life and education
Pariyoush Ganji was born in 1945, in Tabriz, Iran. In 1948, Ganji’s family moved to Tehran. When she was 12, she participated in an art competition, which inspired her to study art. Pariyoush Ganji was a classmate with several known Iranian figures such as Bahman Mohassess, Ahmad Shamloo, Sohrab Sepehri, and Gholamhossein Sa’edi. She completed a formal art education at the Girls' School of Fine Arts, majoring in painting. She was a student of Mahmoud Farshchian, who is famous for his work inPersian miniature painting. She studied in London, England. She participate in Saint Martin's School of Art classes, and took art programs at the Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design. In 1970, she then attended Chelsea College of Arts and graduated after three years. Pariyoush Ganji started by selling her art work before going to Chelsea College of Arts. She worked on "The Safavid Tiles of Isfahan" as her thesis, which is inspired by original designs and paintings of Iranian art. She sold some of her designs to several textile-printing factories. She traveled to Germany in 1974, where she was hired as a designer for Dura Tufing GMBH. As she was in close contact with expressionist painters, she brought fresh visions to her designs. That was an opportunity for her as well to expand her skills and techniques. In 1975, Ganji moved to France and took a course at Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, France. She worked on “the kinetic movement of esoteric arabesque designs of Persian carpets, inspired by the dancing human form”.
Work
She returned to Iran, in 1976, and collaborated with the center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults as well as curating an exhibition of their paintings and illustrating a book. Ganji traveled abroad many times. She was married and had two kids before she went back to Iran to teach. It was 1986 when she taught at many art schools in Tehran. She researched on the visual art of Far East, to find the influential elements of Sassanid Patterns on Japanese visual art through the Silk Road. Pariyoush Ganji has been teaching in many places such as Alzahra University, Islamic Azad University, and University of Tehran. Also, she has been a member in organizations such as Tehran Cultural Heritage Organization, Contemporary Arts Museum, Tehran’s Jury Memberships Contemporary Drawing, Handicrafts, and Tourism Organization. “All throughout her career as a painter, Pariyoush Ganji has spontaneously expressed her love for life, faith in the power of hope and emotional and urbane awareness with an artistic knack. Her expressionist language lacks the sentimental eruption of the early 20th century expressionists. Instead, it is full of emotions intermingled with knowledge and experience realized in her unique painterly language through an intuitional process”. The Cultural Foundation of Japan invited Pariyoush Ganji to Japan in 1996, to work on the influences of Iranian patterns on Japanese textiles. She stayed there for six months. Then, after one year, she worked on a series, which is called Red. Red, a series of painting with red on black backgrounds, were created by Ganji’s social surroundings. In the early 2000s, Ganji started working on Night Windows that replaced red with purple. Night Windows are described to be new ways to historical occurrences to show the light through the darkness shaped by the many layers of purple. She then continued to work on other series called Roses, Day Windows, and Water, each with a different and continual direction for “searching the light". Pariyoush Ganji’s work has been exhibited around the world. She has had around twenty exhibitions and some of her paintings are an important part of the collections in Japan, United Kingdom, and the United States. Throughout the four periods of Ganji’s work, Ganji’s paintings have been exhibited not only in Iran, but also in England, Japan, United States, Germany, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabi, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Uzbekistan, and Switzerland.
Inspirations
Although Ganji has been developing her artistic research and study in countries other than Iran, she has kept her cultural intake throughout her artistic journey as well as representing it in her artistic language. Her school years at Behzad Art Academy that she went to from 1963 to 1966 played an important role to shape her inspirations. She kept her routes of Persian culture even when she went to London and Paris to study, from 1968 to 1975. When she traveled to Japan in 1996, she learned about a Japanese technique called Sumi-e ink and mastered it. That was when she produced some paintings that were “blends of minimal Japanese Shojis and ornamental Persian windows”.
