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Manouchehr Motabar was born in Shiraz, Iran, in 1936. After graduating from the University of Tehran’s College of Fine Arts, he left Iran to take a graduate course in art education Indiana, USA, and three drawing courses at the Art Students League of New York. Since his return to Iran twenty-five years ago, he has been teaching painting and drawing in schools and colleges of visual arts in Tehran.
            Motabar is a draftsman more than a painter, and thus is engaged more in definition than description. When he does employ color in his works, he uses it to emphasize darkness and blackness. Motabar’s accuracy and precision in drawing at times border on an obsession with exactitude.

            The subject matter of Motabar’s paintings is based on his antihumanistic perspective on the people and the world around him. He views the future of humankind pessimistically. Hence depicting human weakness, isolation and alienation. In Motabar’s pictorial world nobody is aware of the presence of others, and all are strangers in each other’s hearts.

            Motabar tries not to fall into the traps of narrative and traditional painting, illustrating his references to life and death very cleverly in a random manner. His dark colors are a symbol of the gloomy and tragic aspects of life - aspects of life that his generation has both witnessed and experienced.

            Motabar recognizes that an artist’s environment cannot provide all his or her concepts and subject matter. Thus some of his images have risen from his own thoughts and memories. He portrays the memories that people have left behind in his mind, and as no one can remember each and every one of the elements comprising a memory, he has come up with a logical mnemonic that influences the shape of his drawings. Motabar maintains that artistic creation is analogous to finding pearls: one must go down deep with love, courage and knowledge.

            Ali Asghar Gharebaghi