Monir. Lightning for Neda, 2009; Courtesy the Artist and The Third Line

The artist who signs her work simply as “Monir” is a prolific and interdisciplinary figure whose 70-year-plus career is currently being celebrated in a retrospective exhibition curated by Suzanne Cotter at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal. Infinite Possibility–Mirror Works and Drawings is the first museum survey of work produced by the nonagenarian between 1974 and 2014, which will also travel to other venues across the world, beginning with the Guggenheim in New York. Undoubtedly a pioneer, Monir is not only the most renowned, but perhaps also the only practitioner working today in the sphere of mirror mosaics.

Monir melds in her hypnotic hybrid creations the legacy of traditional Iranian architectural adornment with an awareness of the aesthetics of abstraction and minimalism made popular by her friends and contemporaries in New York in the 60s, such as Frank Stella and Robert Morris. The majority of the works selected have been drawn from the artist’s own collection, and have not been exhibited in public since the 70s. Included are early mirror reliefs on plaster and wood – spontaneous, energetic compositions accented with glimpses of nightingales nestling amid florid bouquets of flowers and fragments of broken Qajar paintings behind glass—and a series of large-scale geometric mirror works that formed part of a solo show organised by Denise René at her gallery in Paris in 1977. The exhibition also features previously unseen abstract arrangements on paper—many of which were made in exile in New York in the absence of a proper studio in the years following the 79 Iranian Revolution—a series of heptagonal works, four mirror balls (one of which famously lay atop Andy Warhol’s desk until his death in 1987), and a graduated ziggurat-shaped sculpture of particular architectural beauty.

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L to R: Corey Escoto, Wheel of Fortune: I’d Like to Solve the Puzzle, 2010; digital prints, frames, plexiglass, 49 x 135 in. Corey Escoto, House of Cards, n.d.; plexi-mounted digital prints, wax balls; approx. 35 x 45 in. Lilly Zuckerman, 6”x4.5”x3”, 4”x4”x3”, and 5”x3”x3.5”, 2012, porcelain. Courtesy of Lindsey Landfried. Photo: Lindsey Landfried.

A century ago, avant-garde art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler asserted that geometry is “deeply rooted” in our processes of seeing—it gives us, he said, our “categories of vision” and constitutes the “necessary condition for all objective perception.”[1] Kahnweiler’s words resonate with the viewer of RR&P: Repetition, Rhythm, and Pattern, an exhibition of works by ten emerging and mid-career artists largely allied with reductive abstraction. All the works—from charcoal drawings to plexi-mounted digital prints, leaded glass, and mixed-media assemblages—propose a dialogue with the geometric; each represents the result of formal distillation, of visual reduction to a near-minimalist language. Kahnweiler would doubtless have approved.

Yet for all their geometric rigor, these works also hint at the off-kilter, not-so-tidy unraveling of mass-produced, machine-age modes. Kim Beck’s charcoal drawings (all titled Construction Fence [2013]), for example, give eerie personality to manufactured barriers, while Anna Mikolay’s two folded-paper “paintings”—Lines, Folds, Light, and Time, both from 2013—respond idiosyncratically to subtle changes in light, humidity, and the motion of the air. Lilly Zuckerman’s ceramic sculptures (6”x4.5”x3”, 4”x4”x3”, and 5”x3”x3.5” [2012]) transform spare white lines into three-dimensional doodles, and Megan Cotts’ Fig. 5 (n.d.) is an aluminum honeycomb structure that engages details of her family history.

This same interplay of geometric and organic, of the regularized and the uncontrolled, informs other works in the show as well. Some pieces reveal the tactile traces of the artist’s encounter with the materials. Alex Paik’s paper sculptures and Helen O’Leary’s mixed-media assemblages come to mind in this regard. Others, like Crystal Gregory’s leaded-glass architectures (Passage [2012]) or Brian Giniewski’s Paperweights (2013), evoke a sense of intimacy through their small scale and reference to specific environments.

With its generous range of formats and media, RR&P: Repetition, Rhythm, and Pattern both asserts the reductive visual language of minimalist abstraction and bends it toward the individual, unpredictable, and ultimately quirky identity of forms, materials, and sites.

RR&P: Repetition, Rhythm, and Pattern, curated by Lindsey Landfried, is on view through March 26 in the Lewis Art Gallery at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi.

Melissa Thorson Hause is associate professor of art history at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi. In addition to writing about art, she is also active as a German–English translator for art and architecture.