Naser Houshmand Vaziri

Nāser Housh'mand Vaziri (Persian: ناصر هوشمند وزیری) (b. 1946, Hamedan, Iran) is an Iranian sculptor. He is a graduate of the Fine Arts Faculty of University of Tehran. Although stone is his favourite material, he works with such other substances as mud, wood, sand, glass, fibreglass, ceramic, metal and cement. He works both in classical and modern styles of sculpting. He is further a taxidermist.[1] The sculptor and painter Roksānā Houshmand Vaziri[2] and the physicist and sculptor Rāmā Houshmand Vaziri[3] are daughters of Nāser Houshmand Vaziri.

Nāser Houshmand Vaziri was born in Hamedan in 1946. At the age of five he moved with his parents to Tehran. His artistic talent became apparent during his secondary-school years. The sculpture of a street-sweeper that he made during this period was received very favourably by his teachers, who kept it on display in his school for some time. In 1966, after graduating from high-school, he enrolled in the Fine Arts Faculty of University of Tehran, where he studied sculpting and from where he graduated in 1971. He considers his mother as the single most important influence on him as well as his artistic life.[4]

After graduating from university, Mr Vaziri began to work in his sculpting studio on Fātemi Street[5] in Tehran. He continued to work in this location for over thirty years. Around 2005 he closed this studio and moved to Lavāsān's vicinity, in the Lavasanat District, in the North-East of Tehran,[6] where he works on his life-dream, turning his home and surroundings into a workshop and an in- and out-door arts museum. He is further digging a tunnel into the mountain,[7] hoping to reach a natural tunnel in the process. In doing so, he is simultaneously turning the dug tunnel into a museum of arts. He intends also to create, amongst other things, the real-size sculptures of all the mythical heroes of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh.

Mr Vaziri is the creator of twenty-five of the real-size sculptures that have been installed in the Laundry Museum of Zanjān and of the thirty sculptures of the Bagh-e Ferdowsi [8] (The Garden of Ferdowsi) in northern Tehran.

This audio slideshow, as well as this panoramic sequence of images provide a glimpse of the active projects of Mr Vaziri's at the time of writing these lines (i.e. May 2009).