Pouran jinchi biography of albert
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By Delaram Hosseinian, PhD candidate at Leiden University, Netherlands, and Center Winter Intern
For generations, whether inscribing idealistic poetry or didactic religious narratives, the masters of Persian calligraphy have been male. Despite its genderless characteristics, calligraphy has served to empower one gender and suppress the other. The pioneering artist Pouran Jinchi is one of the few contemporary Iranian artists who confronts this tradition and depicts feminine sentiments, not for the sake of aesthetics but to reclaim an authentic feminine voice. For Jinchi, who studied Persian calligraphy as a teenager, calligraphy was not “a dated practice’’ nor one that hampered the female artist, but, rather, an artistic practice that was “her right’’. Rather than discard her passion for calligraphy, Jinchi chose to recast and rejoice in it.
Born in 1959 in Mashhad, one of the most conservative cities in the country, Jinchi would later move to the US, where she received her bache
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Born in Mashhad, a sacred helgedom city in Iran, Jinchi became attuned early in life to the ways architecture, objects, decoration, and the written word can be imbued with symbolic power. This awareness is threaded throughout her body of work, which explores the dense intersectionality of literary and pictorial narratives.
As a student at George Washington University, Pouran earned a degree in civil engineering. Though her studies honed her analytical mind, she ultimately decided to pursue a career in the creative field. Trained as a classical calligrapher in Iran, Pouran went on to study art at UCLA and the Art Students League of New York. Drawing on this varied training, Pouran developed her own artistic approach. Her attention to methodology stems from a background as a mathematician; her formal approach reflects a creative tension between the rigid control of traditional Islamic calligraphy and the fluid spontaneity of Western abstract painting.
Jinchi's work has
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Born in Mashhad, a sacred helgedom city in Iran, Jinchi became attuned early in life to the ways architecture, objects, decoration, and the written word can be imbued with symbolic power. This awareness is threaded throughout her body of work, which explores the dense intersectionality of literary and pictorial narratives.
As a student at George Washington University, Pouran earned a degree in civil engineering. Though her studies honed her analytical mind, she ultimately decided to pursue a career in the creative field. Trained as a classical calligrapher in Iran, Pouran went on to study art at UCLA and the Art Students League of New York. Drawing on this varied training, Pouran developed her own artistic approach. Her attention to methodology stems from a background as a mathematician; her formal approach reflects a creative tension between the rigid control of traditional Islamic calligraphy and the fluid spontaneity of Western abstract painting.
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