Cavin-Morris Gallery is thrilled to present the first exhibition of Iranian Art Brut and Art Singulier in the United States, titled A Conference of the Birds – Art Brut and More from Iran.

‘The Conference of the Birds’, from which we borrowed the title of our exhibition, is a Persian poem by Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar, commonly known as Attar of Nishapur.  The poem depicts a mythical quest of divine self-knowledge, each bird representing a human fault that prevents the embrace of Enlightenment.  The birds go on a quest to find the visionary bird called Samargh, who would teach them to transcend those human foibles and eventually become timeless, with past, present and future becoming simultaneous. 

We saw this timelessness as a great metaphor for the commonalties Jean Dubuffet was discovering in his idealizations of the non-mainstream artists he was collecting under his banner of art Brut.  This inspired us several years ago to begin planning this exhibition with Morteza Zahedi and Sarvenaz Farsian, Iranian artists, collectors, dealers and documentarians of a vast cross-section of the indigenous artists of Iran.

It is very rare that we get to experience a body of work that is more often than not in its original context, accumulated with its own forms respected, moving freely along its own timeless path.  Dubuffet must have felt this thrill when he explored and collected initially in Switzerland.  Others felt similar magic moments with the artists of Kenya, Haiti and in the Arctic.  I felt it when Wayne Cox drove me through Jamaica to meet three generations of artists, year after year.  There are similar chapters in India, Italy, Brazil, and other countries.  We also include many of our experiences in the African American southern reaches of the United States.  These are similarities not in subject matter but in the presentation of universal human concerns. 

In presenting the Iranian oeuvre it is impossible to ignore the textile-like detail and patterning in some of the work.  It reminds us of the power and function of trance in many non-Western cultures.  Trance has been documented as a form of Cultural Resistance.  This resistance is not violent or lawbreaking but rather a creation of solitary or group modes of alternative survival, most often by women.  The filling in of thousands of marks in a horror-vacui composition serves to make time pass in a constructive way.

We are showing work that ranges from narrative and rural work to urban artists and neurologically divergent artists with conditions like Down’s Syndrome and Asperger’s.  Culture is the mantle that warms the creativity.

It is important that always we ask the questions:  Who was this art made for and why?  The mainstream art world and canon is never part of the answer.  The work is primarily made for the artist, and secondarily the immediate community of family and neighbors. In desperate times the work becomes the artists’ confrontation with the passing of time in a life, with filling that time and abstracting the details. 

At the end of ‘The Conference of the Birds’ the birds find out that instead of an ultimate Master each bird is a reflection of the Spirit itself.  To us this is what the artists in this exhibition are.  Ultimately, they and we (because they are us) become mirrors of the Universe.