ArtistSwedish
Karl Momen
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Karl Momen was born on 3 April 1934 in Mashhad, Iran, into a family of Russian and Persian heritage. His father was a designer and maker of fine Persian rugs, and the bold patterns and colors of that craft became a formative influence on Momen's visual thinking from childhood. At seven years old he began painting seriously, guided by Yuri Popow, a Russian avant-garde teacher who introduced the young Momen to the work of Malevich, Tatlin, and El Lissitzky - the Constructivists and Suprematists who had pioneered pure geometric abstraction. That early grounding would shape everything that followed.
As a teenager Momen became a skilled portrait painter, producing likenesses of public figures including Stalin and the Shah of Iran. He then moved to Germany, where he studied at the Stuttgart Kunst Academy. There he worked in the studio of the Surrealist painter Max Ernst and trained under the architect Le Corbusier, absorbing both the painterly and structural dimensions of the European avant-garde. In 1962 he relocated to Sweden, where he established himself as a practicing architect, eventually earning recognition as an award-winning designer before turning fully to painting and sculpture in 1977.
Momen's mature work is built around geometric spheres, intersecting lines, and stylized organic forms. Critics have compared the visual logic of his paintings to Kandinsky in the 1920s - a synthesis of color, circle, and cosmic space that draws equally on Persian decorative traditions and European modernism. He was not making a purely intellectual art: for Momen, the forms carried spiritual weight, the pursuit of transcendence through ideal geometry. A suite of ten large paintings inspired by the operas of Richard Wagner was acquired by Seattle's Nordic Heritage Museum, and his work entered public and private collections across Europe, Japan, and the United States.
His most enduring public work is "Metaphor: The Tree of Utah", an 87-foot concrete and mineral sculpture standing on the Bonneville Salt Flats adjacent to Interstate 80 in Utah. Momen financed and built the piece himself between 1982 and 1986, then donated it to the state of Utah. The sculpture - its trunk rising to six mineral-encrusted spheres - has become one of the stranger landmarks of the American West, a vision Momen reportedly had while driving the highway toward California. In 2009 his work was the subject of a retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm, and he was selected three times for the Biennale de Sculpture de Monte Carlo.
At auction in Sweden, Momen's work appears primarily at Stockholm houses including Metropol, Stockholms Auktionsverk, and Bukowskis, with sculptures and paintings both represented. Works such as "Metaphor: The Tree of Utah" miniature sculptures and geometric compositions in oil and acrylic have changed hands in the range of 5,000 SEK. His 15 auction items in the Auctionist database cover both paintings and sculptures, with the dominant categories reflecting that dual practice. Karl Momen died on 9 April 2024 in Stockholm at the age of 90.