Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian built her art from a shape any designer knows: the hexagon. Divide it, rotate it, nest it, and you get triangles, stars, rhombuses and twelve-pointed rosettes. Then cover those forms in hundreds of small pieces of cut mirror, set in plaster, and the surface stops being still. It fractures the room, the light and the viewer into a moving pattern. Her mirror works join Islamic geometric ornament, Persian architectural craft and postwar abstraction, which makes them useful to anyone who designs with grids, modules or reflective materials.
A note on images: her works are still in copyright, and no record of her own work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Cleveland Museum of Art is flagged as public domain, so they are described here in text only. For cleared images of historical Persian and Islamic objects, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian?
She was born in Qazvin, Iran. The Metropolitan Museum of Art gives her birth year as 1923, while the ArtAsiaPacific obituary gives 1922 and some gallery biographies give 1924. She died at her home in Tehran on 20 April 2019, as reported by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, citing the ISNA news agency, and by Artforum and Artnet.
In the 1940s she travelled to New York to study art; several accounts name Parsons School of Design. Obituaries and the University of Tehran’s profile record that she took a job at the department store Bonwit Teller, where she met the young Andy Warhol, then working as an illustrator.
Back in Iran from the late 1950s, she represented the country at the 1958 Venice Biennale, where several biographies, including Artnet’s obituary, say she won a gold medal for the Iranian pavilion. The turning point for her design language came in Shiraz. Daily Art Magazine and her own interviews describe a visit, usually dated 1966, to the Shah Cheragh shrine, whose interior is covered in mirror mosaic. From the late 1960s she began commissioning and directing traditional craftsmen to make mirror reliefs to her own geometric designs.
In 1979 she and her husband, Abolbashar Farmanfarmaian, were in New York when the revolution took place, and they remained there in exile. Artnet’s obituary and other accounts record that she returned to Tehran in 2004, where she reassembled a studio and resumed work with craftsmen. Her memoir, A Mirror Garden, written with Zara Houshmand, was published in 2007. A museum devoted to her work, the Monir Museum, opened in Tehran in 2017, as reported by The Art Newspaper.
Key works and exhibitions
The works below are dated and attributed by museum records or exhibition material.
- Geometry of Hope, 1976. Reverse-painted glass, mirrored glass, stainless steel and plaster on wood, 128 by 128 cm, lent from a private collection in London to the Guggenheim exhibition of 2015.
- Lightning for Neda, 2009. A six-panel mirror mosaic made for the sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art and now in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, which lists it at 300 by 1200 cm overall.
- Flight of the Dolphin, 2010. Mirror mosaic, reverse glass painting, glue and plaster on wood, 140.3 by 140.3 cm, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- The Family series, from 2010. According to the High Museum of Art, each family is a set of mirrored sculptures that runs from the triangle up through the polygons; James Cohan Gallery describes one family moving from three sides to ten.
- The Heartache boxes. Collage boxes combining cut paper, photographs and found materials, which the High Museum and The Art Story connect to her losses after her husband’s death in 1991.
- Infinite Possibility: Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014. A survey organised by the Serralves Museum in Porto in 2014 and shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York from 13 March to 3 June 2015.
The Met also holds a 2021 gift from her estate of historical Iranian works on paper, including a seventeenth-century drawing by Shafi‘ ‘Abbasi and an early Qur’an folio, a reminder that she was a collector of the traditions she drew on.
What to look at in her mirror works
The hexagon as a seed
Almost every composition can be traced back to the hexagon and the triangles inside it. James Cohan Gallery describes the hexagon as a foundational form for her, with personal symbolic value. In practice it works like a type designer’s skeleton: one underlying structure, many expressions. Rotate the hexagon and you get a star; extend its sides and you get interlocking bands of the kind explored in our guide to Islamic geometric patterns.
Faceted light instead of colour
Mirror has no colour of its own. It borrows the colour of the room and breaks it into shards. That means her works change with every viewing position and every time of day. In the reliefs that combine mirror with reverse glass painting, painted panes add flat, opaque colour against the shimmering mirror ground, and the contrast between still colour and restless reflection is the core effect.
Relief and depth
Many works are not flat. Facets are angled within a plaster bed, so the surface steps forward and back. Each angle catches a different slice of light, which is why the same pattern can read as bright on one side and dark on the other.
Line drawn in ink
Her geometric drawings, shown alongside the mirror works at the Guggenheim, divide polygons into ever smaller units. Systematic and closer to a construction diagram than a sketch, they reveal the structure behind the dazzle.
Technique: directing a craft tradition
Iranian mirror work, known as ayeneh-kari, uses small pieces of cut mirror set in plaster to cover walls and ceilings, as at the Shah Cheragh shrine. Farmanfarmaian did not cut the glass herself. She designed the geometry and worked with skilled craftsmen who scored, cut and set the pieces. One profile names the master craftsman Hajj Ostad Mohammad Navid as a long-term collaborator in the 1970s. Accounts of her exile years note that without her Tehran workshop and its craftsmen she could not produce mirror mosaics, and turned to drawing, collage and the Heartache boxes instead.
The Met’s record for Flight of the Dolphin lists the materials: mirror mosaic, reverse glass painting, glue and plaster on wood. Reverse glass painting means the image is painted on the back of a glass pane and viewed through it, so the first layer applied is the one seen on top.
Her approach shares ground with other artists who built abstraction from geometric systems. Compare her with the Venezuelan sculptor in our Gego guide, who also worked with nets of repeated units, and with the long tradition traced in our overview of Persian art.
How designers can borrow from Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian
- Build a polygon family. Design a set of shapes from three sides up to ten, all drawn on one grid and with one stroke logic. Use them as an icon set, pattern library or identity system. Her Family series is a ready-made brief.
- Start from one module. Pick a single cell, such as a hexagon or a triangle, and see how many layouts you can make by rotating and mirroring it. Our geometric pattern design guide walks through tiling methods.
- Let the material do the colour. In packaging, signage or interiors, a reflective or metallic surface can carry an entire composition if the geometry is strong. Pair it with one or two flat, saturated accent colours, as she did with painted glass.
- Design for movement. Faceted surfaces change as the viewer moves. On screen, a similar effect comes from gradients or light shifts tied to scroll or cursor, but keep the underlying pattern simple so it stays readable.
- Show the construction. Publish or exhibit the working drawings alongside the finished piece. Her drawings prove that the shimmer is the result of method, which builds trust in the final design.
Copyright and where to see her work
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian died in 2019, and her works remain in copyright; the Met marks Flight of the Dolphin as not in the public domain. Her work can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and the Monir Museum in Tehran. For older patterns that are cleared for reuse, see our guide to public domain art.
Frequently asked questions
What is Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian known for?
She is known for mirror mosaics and geometric drawings that join the Iranian craft of mirror work with modern abstraction, built on the hexagon and related polygons. The Guggenheim surveyed four decades of this work in 2015.
What inspired her mirror mosaics?
Her own accounts and several profiles point to a visit, usually dated 1966, to the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz, whose interior is covered in mirror mosaic.
How were her mirror works made?
She designed the geometry, and traditional craftsmen cut and set pieces of mirror into plaster on a wooden support. Many works also include reverse glass painting, where colour is painted on the back of glass panes.
Are her works public domain?
No. She died in 2019, and museum records such as the Met’s mark her work as in copyright, so it is described here in text only. Check the status with the holding museum before any use.
