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 that Nabavi has produced to date is only part of why the work was so taxing. The trial was in the details.

Nabavi 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 that a light is emanating from its core.

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

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

“I started my career in my late 30s, just out of my apartment, and the size of my pieces were always 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 said, what if I use all the time, and all the space that I have to make one piece. I really put everything into this.”

Roswell2223 began as a blank white canvas before Nabavi laid out a grid on top of it using a ruler that measure 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 to Roswell2223, a reference point to ensure the precision that the work demanded. Otherwise, the optical glee that the work evokes – the shimmering geometry – would not have materialised.

Roswell2223 is the centerpiece for Sunrise at the Vortex, Nabavi’s solo exhibition at The Third Line. Antonie Robertson/The National

Nabavi points to one of the shapes within the piece. “For instance, this is an octagon here,” he says. “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 have an octagon, I know I can do things inward and I could do things outward.

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

One errant dot and the entire structure – this dizzying, concentric expanse – will fall flat.

This painstaking calculation is what Nabavi means when he says “everything is where it needs to be.”

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's a lot of academic ways in talking 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 work is very intuitive and I don’t try to attach it to one kind of thing.

“What appeals to me most about this kind of work is that it 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 and ambitious nature of the work took a toll on Nabavi. “It was so physically taxing that I just never really imagined,” he says.

“I had to get knee pads from the hardware store. I was doing yoga and stretching every night and taking baths. 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. “There was a point at which he had a heart attack and he became a lot slower.

“He wasn't able to sit at his desk at a long time. His ideas were growing more complex, but he couldn’t execute his ideas as his body grew weaker.

“The truth is – for most people that are in this kind of work – I don't think that they're 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 works.

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 of the works,” 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 a lot less machine myself.”

However, that’s not to say that these machine-made works 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 same physical toll.

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 was a millimetre off, you lose the whole effect. Not only will it not be pleasant, it kind of will become annoying to look at.”

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