Behjat Sadr is one of Iran's great hidden treasures. With a career spanning more than fifty years, she is one of
only a handful of women artists to have received international accolades for their work. Her powerful, unusually
constructed abstract paintings have been selected for the Venice Biennial and for gallery and museum exhibitions
in Brazil, Canada, France, Iran, Italy, and the U.S. Most recently she was the subject of a major retrospective
at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has appeared in numerous publications and was featured on the
cover of Aujour d'hui magazine.
The film Behjat Sadr: Time Suspended, directed by Mitra Farahani, is a journey into the life and works of this poetic
and brilliant painter. Attracted to the intense power of Sadr's work, filmmaker Farahani was impressed by the
artist's vibrancy and energy when they met in Paris. Sadr, now eighty-two, continues to explore and invent.
In the film, she guides us through her intense, compelling canvases, musing on her process, her influences,
and her complicated relationship with fame and mortality. Her highly abstract mind wanders into dark, mysterious,
beautiful spaces, and the camera follows her, providing visual access and correlatives to her imagination.
Born in 1924 in Arak, Sadr began studying painting at Tehran University in 1948. Two years later she left for Italy where
she studied at the Roberto Melli Academy and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples. In 1956 she joined the Faculty of Fine
Arts at Tehran University where she remained until two years after the Revolution. At this time she moved to Paris where
her works were exhibited alongside those of renowned artists Joseph Beuys and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
Sadr's work continues to evolve over time; indeed one of the distinguishing characteristics of her oeuvre is the artist's continual search for new and innovative techniques. Rhythm is very important to her work and she is known for her innovative techniques. She has covered the surface of a canvas with black paint and then selectively scraped it away to develop shapes and textures. She has mixed oil painting with photographs, figures with abstractions, working in a variety of media from canvas and oil to wood, metal, and other materials. The final product often blurs the distinctions between painting and sculpture.
