With new tools, Nima Nabavi expands the limits of his geometric art

Iranian artist's mid-career pivot on display in Dubai solo exhibition

Nima Nabavi is marking his second solo show at The Third Line with Sunrise at the Vortex. Antonie Robertson / The National

“It’s far from perfect, but everything is where it needs to be,” Nima Nabavi says, stooping over Roswell2223, a work that took him a year and considerable physical strain to complete.

That the piece stretches for 5.5 metres and is the largest Nabavi has produced to date is only part of why it was so taxing. The trial was in the details.

The Iranian artist is known for his complex artworks, which often draw from tenets of sacred geometry, but Roswell2223 stands out for its intricacy and ambition. The work is an awe-inspiring constellation of shapes that come together in an effervescence of octagons, triangles and squares. Its backdrop is as mesmerising, gracefully moving across a spectrum of colours while making it seem like a light is emanating from its core.

Roswell2223 is the centrepiece for Sunrise at the Vortex, Nabavi’s solo exhibition at The Third Line. It marks a pivotal juncture in his practice. He began the work in April 2022, as part of a residency programme at Roswell, New Mexico, intent on achieving something unprecedented.

Roswell2223 is the largest work that Nabavi has produced to date. Antonie Robertson / The National

“I started my career in my late 30s out of my apartment, and the size of my pieces was determined by the size of the table in my living room. I never had a stand-alone studio,” Nabavi says. “So when I got this residency, I had a huge studio and an incredible amount of time. So I thought: ‘What if I use all the time and all the space that I have to make one piece?’ I really put everything into this.”

For Roswell2223, Nabavi laid out a grid on top of a blank white canvas using a ruler that measured almost three metres in length. Given the size of the canvas, the lines had to be drawn in three segments. “Just the background grid took a week to complete,” he says. This grid is imperceptible in the piece – barely peeking out along the unfinished edges, but it was an essential foundation, a reference point to ensure the precision the work demanded. Otherwise, the optical glee that Roswell2223 evokes – thanks to its shimmering geometry – would not have materialised.

Hand-drawn Roswell2223 is the centerpiece for Sunrise at the Vortex. Antonie Robertson / The National

Nabavi points to one of the shapes within the piece. “In an octagon, if you connect each point to every other point, you will have another perfect octagon in the middle. You do that again, you get another octagon in the middle of that. Once I had an octagon, I knew I could do things inward and I could do things outward.

Gesturing to another part of the canvas, he points out: “Octagons can always link together with this central overlap of a diamond. This diamond is the same dimensions of that diamond.”

One errant dot and the structure – its entire dizzying, concentric expanse – would have fall flat.

The painstaking calculations put into the work demanded a precision similar to that in Islamic art and sacred geometry. Nabavi doesn’t explicitly cite either of those disciplines as inspirations, preferring instead to let viewers imbibe the work as they see fit.

“I think there are a lot of academic ways to talk about this work,” he says. “There are also philosophical ways of talking about it, as well as spiritual and pseudo-spiritual. Everyone has a way of naming things. For me, a lot of this is very intuitive and I don’t try to attach it to one kind of thing.

“What appeals to me most is that this kind of work neutralises people’s cynicism and everyone feels some kind of connection to it.”

Pen-plotters helped Nabavi push the limits of his practice. Antonie Robertson / The National

Yet, the sprawling nature of the project took its toll. “It was more physically taxing that I ever imagined,” he says. “I had to get knee pads from the hardware store. I was doing yoga and stretching, and taking baths every night. It was very painful.”

The pain, however, helped Nabavi break new ground in his practice. The fatigue and physical strain could have easily pushed him to adopt a more minimal approach, but Nabavi was steadfast in his tendency towards complexity.

“My grandfather was also a geometric artist,” he says. “After he had a heart attack, he became a lot slower and wasn’t able to sit at his desk for a long time. His ideas were growing more complex, but he couldn’t execute them as his body grew weaker.

“I don’t think most people doing this kind of work are moving towards simplicity. I think they’re moving towards complexity, but at some point they see a physical fatigue.”

Nabavi, however, was ­adamant not be slowed down. All he needed was a little bit of help. The rest of the artworks in Sunrise at the Vortex were all produced using an architectural pen-plotter. Unlike standard printers that print pixels, plotters draw continuous lines by moving pens across the paper, making for highly detailed and precise art.

The technology allowed Nabavi to explore compositions that went beyond what he was physically capable of before. It also helped him develop his practice beyond the studio.

With this new process comes the freedom to scale up in complexity, to test limits without physical constraint. Antonie Robertson / The National

“These works are my first year of experimentation with digital drawing and machine manifestation,” he says. “There is a learning curve, but you’re moving fast. The nice thing with using these machines is once I’ve done the drawing, I might let the machine run overnight. Or I’ll start plotting and go to the park. The machine allows me to be less machine-like myself.”

That’s not to say that the machine-made artworks are any less exacting. The same obsessive precision is required and a single miscalculation can throw the entire design off course.

Still, the process offers Nabavi the freedom to scale up in complexity and test the limits of geometric art without the physical toll creating Roswell2223 took on him.

As such, Nabavi isn’t easing into automation. He is using it to push further, to build on the rigour of hand-drawing with a new set of tools. The machines aren’t a shortcut, he stresses, but a continuation.

“If one of these lines were a millimetre off, you’d lose the whole effect. Not only will it not be pleasant, it will kind of become annoying to look at.”

Sunrise at the Vortex is running at The Third Line until July 27