Bio
Born in Iran in 1978, Nima Nabavi is a self-taught Iranian-American artist who was raised in the United Arab Emirates.
Even though he received his MBA and ran an independent business for 15 years – he unexpectedly changed paths in 2016 inspired by the geometric art of his late grandfather. He is now based between Dubai and New York, dedicating himself to an abstract art practice driven by a mathematical approach and a contemplative execution of intricate geometries.
Nabavi's 2023 solo exhibition 'VISITING’ at Roswell Museum, New Mexico featured his largest work to date, an 18-foot by 6-foot painting that took him an entire year to complete during his residency at the Roswell Artist-In-Residence program. Later that year, he collaborated with fellow painter, Jason Seife, on the conceptual, two-person exhibition ‘DUALITY’ which ran at The Third Line in Dubai through January 2024.
Nabavi's group exhibitions include: ‘Geometry and Art in The Modern Middle East’, Misk Art Institute, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (2023), ‘Gradate’, Sharjah Museum, Sharjah, UAE (2022), ‘Ways of Seeing Abstraction - Works from the Deutsche Bank Collection’, Palais Populaire, Berlin, Germany (2021); ‘There is Fiction In The Space Between’, The Third Line, Dubai, UAE (2020); ‘Crafting Geometry: Abstract Art from South and West Asia’, Sotheby’s, New York, USA (2020); ‘Your Favorite Artist's Favorite Artist #2’, Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, USA (2019).
Nabavi was the 2022 winner of the inaugural BULGARI Contemporary Art Award, presented in conjunction with Dubai Culture and Arts Authority. His work has been featured in books such as Geometry and Art in the Modern Middle East and publications such as Southwest Contemporary and Canvas.
Nabavi's work is part of private and public collections, including the Deutsche Bank Collection, Germany, The Jameel Arts Centre, UAE and the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, New Mexico.
Artist Statement
My work is focused on geometric abstraction and its connection to the natural world, quantum processes and psychedelic phenomena.
My drawings and paintings are heavily layered, grid-driven manifestations of imagined, ordered structures and are greatly inspired by the work of my grandfather who was a geometric artist for over fifty years in Iran. For as long as I knew him, he was always engaged in deep explorations of the underlying, source grids from which the infinite tessellations of sacred geometry emerge. His work was more akin to a spiritual and mathematical quest than an artistic practice – as though he was truly trying to decode parts of nature’s algorithm. “The whole universe is in these grids”, he would often tell me.
In 2016, two years after my grandfather passed away, I was suddenly struck with an intense curiosity about his work. I started drawing my own grids based on residual memories I had of conversations with him about the rhythms of those linear constructions. Little did I know that I was about to get drawn into the same portal that he had walked into half a century earlier – and see what pulled him in so deep.
Using mainly pens, paint and rulers, I apply repetitive numeric symbolism and thousands of hand-drawn lines and pixels to build complexity out of simple forms. This mathematical approach relies on advanced planning, precise calculations and several, self-developed methodologies to ensure vital dimensional accuracy. The slow execution of the work is engrossing, meditative and deeply satisfying. I often create work in a series of separate, interconnected pieces that together signify sequential and infinite progressions of color and pattern.
The intention of my practice is to remember, reveal and represent the emergent harmony and inherent beauty that underlies the structure of our shared reality.
Essay by Natasha Morris, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2019
Nima Nabavi’s work is perhaps best described as ‘primordial modernism’. A deliberate oxymoron, a Jungian catchword, a nebulous concept; yet it is the only phrasing that does justice to the ability of Nabavi’s abstract pieces to speak to both the past and the future simultaneously. Whilst Nabavi’s practise is automatic, his skill innate and self-taught, his process is laborious and the results complex and demanding of both his time and the viewer’s visual attention. His manner of working is inherited in part from his grandfather – a graphic designer in Tehran during the 1950s-1970s, during the height of a national taste for neon signage – whose career carries with it its own mythology: he was perhaps the mastermind behind national newspaper mastheads and the Arabic script version of the Coca-Cola logo. In a way, Nabavi feels that he is channelling his grandfather’s creative spirit when he works; any prior knowledge gleaned through childhood osmosis through witnessing the ustad (master) drawing and being surrounded by patterns created out of seemingly infinite lines.
Beyond this harnessing of this familial skill, there is an affinity with a visual language that is as universal as it is distinctly ‘Persianate’ or ‘Islamic’. As much as one may find themselves teleported under a murqanas-studded ceiling (the honeycomb-shaped vaulting used in Islamic architecture) when engaged with Nabavi’s infinite geometries, it has just as much in common with the ordered experimentation of Sol le Witt or the prismatic texture of Gabriel Dawe. Nabavi describes himself as ‘re-finding’ rather than ‘creating’; the forms of circles, lines and triangles having been around since time immemorial. The appeal of abstraction is that it allows for an objective way of processing the universe, the artist finding a strange comfort in the fact that there is a base equation and invisible rulebook for such phenomena.
“There is no reason”, Nabavi says, “as to why good maths should be aesthetically beautiful, but it is”. Geometry produces a visual language that is understood by all, producing a structural purity that is pleasing to any eye. Part of Nabavi’s process is a meditation on this point, whilst pushing the boundaries of what is possible with a ruler and a pen. He is driven, in part, by “moving into the weirdness”. This is a statement that perhaps connects him more with any Medieval Islamic artisan than the use of geometry itself: those original practitioners had nothing more to hand than a compass and some ink yet they managed to similarly “look into nothingness” to conjure a limitless tessellation of shape and line.
Just as the signatures of geometers were mostly absent in the golden ages of Islamic art, Nabavi treats any marks of his own authorship as straightforwardly as a barcode. Works are unnamed, with each one produced as a sequel to the previous piece. Despite this illusion of anonymity, the works still give away the hand of their maker, albeit in subtle ways. Nabavi speaks of two types of mistake that still define his process as handmade: either it is ‘incorrect spelling’ (meaning if the maths is wrong, such as a line being 1mm out, this entails a complete re-start of the work) or the less aggrieving ‘bad handwriting’ (a discrepancy in the thickness of line, forms of micro-mistake that give the apparent perfection of the composition a ‘human touch’). These slight variations that ‘bad handwriting’ provides are imperative to the viewer’s experience: demanding that the eye both moves and processes such minutiae. These are ‘faults’ that actually give each work a texture that would be impossible to achieve via digital means. Grids and colours are layered onto each other in such a way as it creates a bruise-like effect, deliberately tricking the mind into confusion: which shade is this? Which shape is this? Although clean, geometric, and pleasing, Nabavi’s work deliberately subverts the legibility of geometric abstraction, and is all the richer for it.
Essay by Saira Ansari, ‘1, 2, 3’ solo exhibition catalogue
It is said that God is the geometer of the world. The enchantment with mathematics, and specifically geometry, has perhaps a lot to do with the seemingly transcendental properties it encapsulates. It has arrested the imaginations of scientists, artists, poets and religious men alike. The fluid proficiency with how this discipline maps complex structures, patterns, proportions and relationships between everything and anything in space, has continued to render mathematicians into philosophers and magicians – for what else is it but wizardry when one can calculate the curl of the leaf, or the increasing distance of a long last star no longer visible to the naked eye.
The earliest examples of our use of geometry goes back to the 2nd millennium B.C. when the human race needed to calculate how to build pyramids and chart the movement of the sun and the stars. Today, we can use the same principles to see into the microns upon the tips of our fingers and build satellites that take us closer to the lost planets. But apart from what we may see as purely functional uses, geometry has proved itself to be both the tool and the muse of artists, craftsmen and architects for several millennia.
The lure of geometrical abstraction, especially under the mantle of scared geometry, has certainly not decreased and many artists continue to employ its vocabulary in their work. As the world moves closer and closer to complete automation in many industries, reducing human intervention and intimacy and increasing duplicative accuracy, there is an undeniable pleasure in returning to the obsessive calculations of the human mind and a mastery of handwork. Such has been the preoccupation of Nima Nabavi, who’s exhibition 1, 2, 3 is based on 27 drawings that he spent eight months working on – the process: part fixation, part meditation. Bent over sheets of paper, Nabavi spent scores of hours meticulously inking thousands of near-identical lines in a predefined grid, all towards a dizzying vision of geometric abstraction. He repeated the exercise again and again, moving along a set of self-made rules and calculations, each equation evolving with the next drawing.
In Nabavi’s drawings, the grid is crucial to the making of the work, and to understanding the infinite ways of creation that lie within each box. The grid itself has been at the centre of vigorous discourse around modernism in art: whether it is a cold and calculated structural support system, or whether its own weight and presence adds to the image as strongly as the elements it supports.
Logically speaking, the grid extends, in all directions, to infinity. Any boundaries imposed upon it by a given painting or sculpture can only be seen - according to this logic - as arbitrary. By virtue of the grid, the given work of art is presented as a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric. Thus the grid operates from the work of art outward, compelling our acknowledgment of a world beyond the frame. (Krauss, 1979)
While Nabavi doesn’t rely on metaphysical language to describe his work, it is the larger natural universe that inspires him. Bringing the macrocosm to the micro, each series of drawings experiments with a new set of laws that, though might provide a new visual on paper, is symbolically an imitation of the laws that may exist somewhere in nature already. The shifting of these minute calculations, box by box at the baseline of the grid, signal a change in the design – sometimes in density, sometimes in direction. The variation is barely visible at the start point, but as the lines leap across the surface, their deviations become significantly more evident.
Unless close inspection reveals the shake of the hand or the varying pressure of the nib, Nabavi’s renderings fool one into believing that these are machine produced. Fractals, plaids and stars are generated in such uniformity that one’s first reaction is to dismiss this realism for the synthetic. Each drawing in the series is witness to a feverish control and planning, from concept stage to execution. While every move of Nabavi is closely calculated, and noted down in advance, the process manifest surprises along the way, never quite revealing where and how it will end. The journey becomes a way for Nabavi to connect to a larger framework that exists in nature, or what he refers to as the mechanics that run the universe. And so, the process itself becomes as important as the culmination.
In Series 1, 16 black and white drawings seem to buzz with energy. Each drawing moves a step ahead in a sort of stop-motion frame, the lines intensifying toward the centre like a kaleidoscope. While the first drawing has a low-density centre that makes it appear light, a rhombus seems to close in on itself in the subsequent images. The final image is an inversion of the original, the centre now dark with the increased density of crossing lines. Although each work is freestanding, Nabavi imagines the sequence playing out in an animation. This is how he imagines the works come alive, in their co-relation and conversation with each other. This monochromatic series, with the largest number of drawings, sets the foundation for the whole body of work.
Series 2 is different from the previous not only in the introduction of colours – eight of them to be precise – but also in the way the movement in the frames evolves from the first drawing to the eighth and last one. As the lines morph into shapes, and the varying densities layer upon each other to create light and dark areas, the surfaces pulse with movement. The images are directly evocative of psychedelic art, where the colours oscillate as if flowering from within. These drawings are also the smallest in the series, with each piece sized to eight by eight inches. The use of the number eight – in the dimensions, colours and quantity – is a silent nod to the number’s importance in geometry, as well as many ancient belief systems.
It is in Series 3 that the whole body of work finds its culmination. Three large drawings – the largest in all series at 24 by 24 inches – seem to ground themselves in an octagram at their centre. The eight points of the star never move from the four sides that they are resting against, yet the star seems to palpitate a fragmented spectrum of colours. These colours are subtler than the previous series with the use of five hues belonging to close, warm families: purple, red, magenta, orange and black. These images rely on a combination of elements and methods applied to the previous two series, yet they couldn’t be any more divergent. They seem to represent a stable, structural form, with sharper angles and defined edges. The sense of space and place are both framed tightly within the paper, and the reverberating lines do not move the eye away from the stationary star form.
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This is Nabavi’s first exhibition ever, though it is not his first time making art, or being surrounded by it. Nabavi’s grandfather and grand-uncle set up one of the first graphic design companies that put up outdoor billboards and neon signs in Iran, producing iconic signs that still exist in Tehran. As Nabavi grew older, his natural inclination towards design pushed him to start his own business in Los Angeles, where he had migrated to with his family. Nabavi spent a lot time with the artists in the underground scene and found himself at home in the DIY/indie scene of the 90s. He went on to collaborate with several contemporaries and then started his own independent streetwear company with original designs. Although he was surrounded by artists around him, and within his family, he never really considered himself as one – at least formally speaking.
It has been Nabavi’s grandfather’s drawings that left the deepest impact on him, the memory of which, several decades later, have brought him into creating his own. Etched in his mind are visuals of Hassan Shadravan perched on his desk drawing away endlessly in a quest for geometric perfection, trying to explain to others why what he was doing was important. It was something that seemed to anchor his grandfather, and which went on to become an all-consuming fixation after his retirement in what felt like his way to work through internal noise and turmoil. It was much more than an artistic gesture; it seemed like an engrossment with solving puzzles that only he knew of. Nabavi recalls those drawings as beautiful but, at the time, he was unable to grasp the complex sphere of geometry that his grandfather seemed lost in. Now, when trying to find meaning and reflection in his own daily life, Nabavi found himself returning instinctively to this ritual.
There is a belief that an intensive and isolated studio practice is a nucleus of awareness, vulnerability and insight, all of which form the building blocks of the artist’s mind and work. Nabavi’s practice is home to the obsessive nature of his work – one that sways between a meditative stance and a laboured fixation. In his case, or in the case of Hassan Shadravan, the discipline of practice becomes sanctum and sanatorium to the maladies of everyday life.