Hossein Valamanesh: Poetic Objects

"...I don't know how to put it in words. Sometimes it is easier to make the object. It is like a good poet: they don't explain anything, they make a puzzle and then you read it, and then you think it is a beautiful way to put it down. And I am hoping that in a visual world, I am making some kind of poetic objects that can make you think in different ways. And sometimes I succeed..." [1]

Speaking in 2014, Hossein Valamanesh remarked upon the good fortune he felt that he and the poet and Sufi mystic Rumi shared a mother tongue. [2] Despite moving to Konya (modern-day Turkey), Rumi opted against writing most of his poems in Turkish, Arabic or Greek, composing the Masnavi-e-Ma'navi in Farsi. In so doing, he created one of the masterpieces of Persian literature.

Rumi’s poems—along with other Persian poets from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries—were fixtures of Valamanesh’s education and upbringing, read aloud by family or studied at school. These remembered and revisited verses became a recurring source of inspiration within his artistic practice—which many have described as poetic, in visual terms.

Just as Valamanesh felt lucky to have shared a common language with a poet of Rumi’s calibre, we are all extremely fortunate that an artist such as Valamanesh chose to settle and produce five decades of work in Australia.

Arriving in Perth in 1973, Valamanesh was immersed early in Australian traditional cultures, visiting Aboriginal communities between Perth and Alice Springs in 1974. At Papunya, Valamanesh met and painted alongside Elders who gave him permission to create dot paintings, on the condition that he used the technique to paint his “own story”. The paintings Valamanesh made at Papunya were the first he created in Australia, and the experience marked what he later reflected upon as a “pivotal point” in his development as an artist:

“What was overwhelming about this experience was witnessing our connection to nature and the universe. It did not seem to matter where we had come from and I felt I was part of the ceremony. The effects on my practice were both physical, through the use of natural materials, and metaphysical by recognition of such a connection.” [3]

The inseparability of the numinous from the use of natural materials was a feature of Valamanesh’s practice over decades. In his own works, and in his many collaborations with his wife, Angela—who he met while studying at the South Australian School of Art, Adelaide—and with their son, Nassiem, Valamanesh always evoked, in an interrelated way, a web of conceptual, formal and material tensions and reconciliations. As he said in 2010:  “I think my art is about not separating elements such as aesthetics, content and form, from each other. The interconnectedness of these elements in the work is important. I hope it is like looking at a tree with all its complexities.” [4]

This exhibition at Annette Larkin Fine Art comes from the artist’s collection and includes representative works spanning two decades of practice from the early-2000s until Valamanesh’s unexpected passing in 2022. From miniatures on paper to sculptures made from branches, palm fronds and bronze, each piece speaks to a distinct moment within the artist’s career and the compelling conversations he hoped to initiate with everyone who encountered his work.

In 1999, Valamanesh held a residency at the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan. Beginning in the 1980s, the College had overseen a revival of sorts in South Asian miniature painting, and Valamanesh had a chance to spend time with students studying this discipline.  Back in Australia, his walks in nature and collaborations with Angela led to the creation of miniature works on paper of his own. He collected leaves and petals—bougainvillea, rubinia, alstroemeria, rhuse, desert pea—coating them in wax varnish and delicately arranging them in tessellated grids, or else in more complex patterns reminiscent of the decorative motifs in South Asian architecture and textiles. Valamanesh later began to incorporate ginkgo, culminating in his 2010 collaborative commission with Angela for the Ginkgo Gate of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens.

This exhibition includes a work from the edition of Fallen Branch, 2005, a bronze sculpture cast from the limbs of a white cedar tree that fell on Valamanesh’s street, and that the artist dragged back to his studio.[5] Like so many of his tree branch sculptures, there is an essential tension between the beauty of nature as found object and the role of creative intervention by the artist’s hand. Composed in the round, the work nonetheless feels as if it obeys the laws of nature—just as nature has been found to conform with aesthetic, mathematical principles such as the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence.

Valamanesh’s use of negative space, especially in his branch sculptures, creates visual effects that are strongly reminiscent of crown shyness—the seemingly defensive phenomenon in forest canopies where neighbouring trees avoid direct contact. It is extraordinary how much tension Valamanesh is able to evoke visually by the faintest passages of negative space within a work—from the slivers of paper visible between the kaleidoscopic leaf segments of Worm 2, 2009, to the ways in which the petals of Darling Pea Petals, 2005, curl towards each other, without ever meeting.

A significant exception is fittingly and poetically found in what ended up being one of Valamanesh’s final bodies of work—the Together sculptures, 2021. Where other works see a branching out, as it were, the Together sculptures are instances of convergence at a single point, like the hairs of a calligrapher’s brush. Complete with black paint applied towards this imagined brush-tip, these works are yet another example of the poetic tension and harmonic balance in Valamanesh’s sculptures between the artist’s materials and the formal and aesthetic relationships he presents to the audience.

When he was interviewed by the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005 about his kinetic sculpture The lover circles his own heart, 1993, Valamanesh said that while it was “the physical world—nature, walking, collecting material” that inspired him, it was the dialogue he facilitated between his audience and nature that completed the work: “It’s like having a conversation with the world around you. But not taking it too seriously, because it stands outside the reality of what every day is about.” [6] That sense of good humour, reciprocity with the audience, and his poetic sensibility, all seem to have contributed to Valamanesh’s endurance as an artist and the profound impact that he and his works have had in Australia and around the world.

A skilled and generous interlocutor in his many interviews, Valamanesh was invariably asked at the end of a conversation about what the future held. His answers variously referred to contentment in his life and a quiet, assured determination in his practice—but always paired with excitement about the next work on the horizon, the next collaboration with Angela, further collaboration with Nassiem, or the next opportunity to create or converse with nature. While, with great sadness, there will be no future creations from the artist’s hands, each work that Valamanesh made in his lifetime continues a legacy of dialogue and encounter between nature, the artist and the audience that will endure for posterity—just as Rumi’s poems resonated throughout the artist’s life. 

Jack Howard, 2025

[1] Hossein Valamanesh, quoted in Bérénice Saliou, ‘Interview with Hossein Valamanesh,’ in Hossein Valamanesh: Puisque tout passe, Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris, 2021, p. 39.

[2] Hossein Valamanesh, ‘An Evening with Hossein Valamanesh,’ Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery, Bundaberg, 10 July 2014, 11:00-11:16 available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuCz0H4USNk>.

[3] Hossein Valamanesh, quoted in Ian North, ‘Profiling Hossein: a conversation with the artist’ in Mary Knight and Ian North (eds.), Hossein Valamanesh: Out of nothingness, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2011, p. 13

[4] Ibid, p. 15.

[5] Hossein Valamanesh, ‘An Evening with Hossein Valamanesh,’ Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery (n 2 above), 24:25-25:35.

[6] Hossein Valamanesh, ‘Hossein Valamanesh artist interview, for the exhibition MCA Collection: New Acquisitions in Context, 3 January 2005 00:35-01:45 <https://www.mca.com.au/stories-and-ideas/videos/hossein-valamanaesh-interviewed/>.