When a 20-year old Iranian art student moved to New York in 1944 from her hometown, the ancient city of Qazvin, she soon found herself mixing with the brightest players of the city’s art scene including Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol. John Cage crowned her “that beautiful Persian girl”. But the work of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian had a different source, not in Warhol’s Factory or Matthattan’s Studio 54 nightclub but beneath the crystalline high-domed hall of the Shah Cheragh mosque in Shiraz, southern Iran. There she had experienced in 1966 a transformative encounter she compared to “walking into a diamond at the centre of the sun”.

Read More: Infinite Possibility: Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian