Reza Shafahi: from retired wrestler to 'outsider' artist

Despite the catastrophic impact of U.S. sanctions on the Iranian economy, now compounded by the Covid-19 health crisis, somehow Tehran's art scene soldiers doggedly on. There's even something of a 'movida' in the air, as galleries established in the north of town open up spaces in the newly-trendy mid-town area, home to the Pejman Foundation's spectacular conversion of an old brewery into a multi-purpose contemporary art centre: the Argo Factory. The bravest have also creatively revamped their business models to continue, exchange rates notwithstanding, to appear at international fairs - if and when, these days, such events actually go ahead.

Interestingly, what in the west is called 'outsider art' or 'art brut' (according to Wikipedia, 'art by self-taught or naïve art makers') is quite a strong component of the contemporary art scene in Iran, where it isn't confined to specialist spaces, but shown by 'mainstream' galleries (for which reason the artists themselves are bewildered to discover that abroad, they're seen as 'outsiders').

Reza Shafahi is now in his 80s, and wasn't an artist at all, but a retired wrestler and wrestling coach. His son Mamali, however, is an artist and in 2012, as part of a complex, long-term project centring on transmission from generation to generation, Daddy Sperm, in which he deliberately and actively involved his parents, he asked his father, then 72, to draw.

Initially, Mamali supplied the subjects, but eventually Reza took to drawing and painting from his own, fertile imagination. Mamali included some of his father's first drawings in an early Daddy Sperm exhibition, and he and his sisters started posting pictures online, gradually building up a following of both amateurs and art professionals. So Reza began to have his work shown in group exhibitions (e.g. at Marlborough in New York), then had his his first solo shows in Berlin in 2016 (From Water to Lemon Juice, Erratum Gallery) and in Tehran in 2018 (Diaries of a wrestler, Delgosha Gallery).

In 2019, the Daddy Sperm project culminated in a 300-square-metre installation, designed by Mamali Shafahi, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, as part of the museum's huge summer exhibition Prince·sse·s des villes. The installation combined sculptures, objects and custom-built furniture with screens and projections showing successive scenes from Mamali's experimental docu-fiction film Nature Morte, in which the artist appears alongside his parents. At the entrance to the installation space, Mamali built a giant wall of Reza's paintings (see below) beside a small screen showing the brief but intriguing opening scene of the film, described by Ashkan Sepahvand in the magazine Palais 29, covering the exhibition:

'Two men, one older, one younger, sit at a table. They unenthusiastically play around with the food on their plates, taking a bite here and there. The scene is tense. The younger one has a look on his face - with attitude. A glimmer of a smirk. They open their mouths to talk but their voices are coming from elsewhere. They are lip-synching. This becomes obvious when the younger man speaks suddenly with a female voice. “I’m pregnant,” he says. (...) Silence. “What’s wrong?,” the man-woman says to his father-boyfriend. The older man picks at his food with his fork, avoiding any eye contact. “It just came as a shock to me...”'

With his family's support, Reza Shafahi now has his own Instagram account and an impressive collection of press cuttings (e.g. the New York Times, the L.A. Review of Books, the Brooklyn Rail), and exhibits and sells in Europe, Asia and the Americas. And the most recent twist in the story is that his son, Mamali, is now making works based on his. In other words, after the son transformed the father into an artist, now the father's work is inspiring the son's.

Photo: Aurélien Mole, Palais de Tokyo