Portrait of the Artist. © Nigel Hall
Manijeh Yadegar Hall (1951-2016) developed her own powerful and unique visual language. She explored abstraction with an unequivocal femininity. Her paintings are strong assertions of her womanhood – and possess that rare quality of combining striking beauty with a quiet contemplative quality. They exude a powerful, but serene aura and their elemental nature makes us pause to reflect upon their essence and consider our personal response to their abstract forms. Yadegar Hall wrote of her works:
“The resultant marks and washes echo the physical rhythms of the body. Areas of dark and light take turns in the dominant role. There is a strong element of spatial interweaving, an interplay between figure and ground, a contrasting of soft and hard edge changing the focus from sharp to hazy. They develop observations of the natural world into completely abstract images; memories of places, moments in time, the transition between night and day, dawn to dusk. I would wish the paintings to have a contemplative beauty and to transmit light with a sensation of calm, but strong feeling.”
Manijeh Yadegar Hall was born in Esfahan, Iran and came to England when she was thirteen. She trained at Chelsea and Camberwell School of Art in London. Although she has worked in relative seclusion since her student days, she has had solo exhibitions worldwide, including in the UK, Sweden and South Korea, and has participated in over fifty group exhibitions. In 2001 she was Artist in Residence at the Chretzeturm in Stein am Rhein, Switzerland.
Her work is represented in the collections of Deutsche Bank, London; The Contemporary Art Society, London; Iowa University; Saïd Business School University of Oxford; and many private collections in England and abroad. In 2021 eight of Yadegar Hall’s work have been acquired for the collection of the British Museum.