Obituary: Hossein Valamanesh (1949–2022)

The Australian and international art community share a tremendous sense of loss and grief at the sudden passing of Hossein Valamanesh on the evening of January 15 from a heart attack. We have lost a true poet. Drawing on the cultural and natural worlds of his birthplace in Iran, in 1949, and his adoptive home of Australia since 1973, Hossein explored the entwined spheres of love, spirituality, and nature. His practice embraced a wealth of materiality including sculpture, text, photography, installation, architecture, large-scale public art, and moving image, with equal alacrity. 

Born in Tehran, Hossein’s parents were from northern Iran, in what is now Azerbaijan, on the Caspian Sea, and he spent part of his early childhood in the eastern city of Khash, near the border with Pakistan. He moved with his family back to Tehran for high school and, always drawn to art and culture, he entered the Tehran School of Art at the age of 18, graduating in 1970 with a focus on political and socially-charged work. He was also a member of Bijan Mofid’s theater troupe from 1968 to 1971. Hossein emigrated to Perth, Australia, and worked with a multi-arts collective in Aboriginal communities including Papunya in the Northern Territory for four months in 1974, which had a profound influence on his thinking, particularly his relationship to song and nature. He moved to Adelaide to study at the South Australian School of Art and graduated in 1977.

For 46 years he shared a wonderland of a studio and home in Adelaide with his wife and frequent collaborator, the artist Angela Valamanesh, whom he met soon after graduating. Their studio is attached to their home, with a verdant garden filled with fruit trees, grapevines, and sculptures. The interconnectedness of the personal and the professional dimensions of Hossein’s life informed his artistic collaborations with Angela and their son, Nassiem, a filmmaker. 

Natural substances as diverse as saffron, tree branches, live flames, and gold leaf were gifted new life as poetic forms in his hands. Memory, translocation, and the ephemerality of life make constant appearances in his inventive work as he harnessed exquisitely charged aesthetic languages to voice his ideas. A tremendous generosity informed his nuanced practice and an abiding curiosity for the human condition. Enigmatic with allusions to the ineffable, Hossein’s work frequently reference the artist’s abiding interest in poetry, especially the texts of 13th-century Persian mystic poet Rumi. His art invites emotional responses and interpretative possibilities. As he wrote in 2005 artist statement:

“Most works of art have within them the seed of an idea and the opportunity of exhibiting them may make it possible for these seeds to grow in the viewer’s mind with different interpretations. My original idea is only the beginning and I also follow the development of the work with interest. It is by our looking at the works that they realise their potential.” 

My first encounter with Hossein’s work was The lover circles his own heart (1993), and I was struck by its quiet simplicity and poetic singularity. The work encompasses a twirling white silk cone, human scale, in a darkened room. The artist initially conceived it for a space in the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, yet it was not until he visited the tomb of Rumi in Konya, Turkey, soon after, that he actually witnessed whirling Mevlevi dervishes for the first time. The work is currently on display in the Hammam at the Institut des Cultures d’Islam. He noted in a 2021 interview with curator Bérénice Saliou: “The dance that has no dancer. It was a comment about how I was talking about the idea of not wanting to be in the image but just be the shadow, or the outline.”

I also experienced his truly memorable collaborative work in the theater with his sensuous stage design for Andrew Bovell’s When the Rain Stops Falling for Brink Productions at the Adelaide Festival in 2008. This work became a centerpiece of the 2013 exhibition “Heartland” at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), curated by Nici Cumpston and Lisa Slade. Yet it was not until I moved to Adelaide to take up my role at AGSA three years ago that I had the deep pleasure of coming to know Hossein and Angela, two beloved figures in the arts community here—mentors, collaborators, prolific artists, and friends to so many artists. The AGSA has been truly fortunate to have worked closely with Hossein over four decades; Lisa Slade in particular on several projects. His works including After Rain (2013) is on constant display at the AGSA and are among the most loved by our community. The art of Angela and Hossein Valamanesh will also feature strongly in the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, “Free/State,” curated by Sebastian Goldspink, which opens on March 4 at the AGSA.

Hossein presented more than 30 solo exhibitions around the world and participated in exhibitions from Canada to Iran, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, India, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Japan, and France. His solo exhibitions include several with his Adelaide gallerist Greenaway Art Gallery / GAG Projects; “Char Soo,” at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth (2016) and Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia, Adelaide (2015); “Assemblage: 1980–1985,” at Grey Noise Gallery, Dubai (2013); “Tracing the Shadow,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2002); and at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (1991). Hossein’s work is held in many significant collections in Australia including the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington; the AGSA in Adelaide; and the Sara Hildén Art Museum, in Tampere, Finland. His public art commissions are installed in Australia and Japan. Hossein was awarded the Grand Prix at the Bangladesh Biennale in Dhaka in 1998; a Member of the Order of Australia in 2011; the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington, DC, in 2014; and the Adelaide Film Festival’s Art and Moving Image Commission in 2015.

Hossein’s work is currently the subject of a major solo exhibition “Puisque tout passe (This will also pass),” curated by Bérénice Saliou at the Institut des Cultures d’Islam in Paris until February 13, 2022. Hossein borrowed the title of the exhibition from an exhibition at Greenaway Art Gallery in Adelaide in 2007 and a work of the same name based on a Persian text. Made from twigs, then cast in bronze, the work itself is a translation across languages, material form, and notions of permanence and transience. Regarding the title he explained in the catalogue: “It is a common saying in Iran, it expresses the transience of life, that everything is going to pass. It is a way of consoling people, this is to say, ‘don’t worry, it is going to be ok.’” The beautiful publication only arrived last week and Hossein was here at the Gallery on Friday to finally hold it and to plan its launch and other projects here with us. His work continues to inspire our thoughts and expand our hearts.

His work always followed a path of love; in the artist’s words: “I loved drawing. But it wasn’t a spiritual love, it was just a love of drawing and I followed it. Then I went to art school against all the recommendations from my parents. But I followed love. Then I followed this woman here. Love, again. Then I went to follow that, and I keep doing it. And it has been very good to me. In that sense, that is the main theme of my life, a sense of following what I desire, my passion. And I have been rewarded. I want to encourage people to love more and remind them it exists.”

Rhana Devenport ONZM is the director of the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide.

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