Under Every Deep a Lower Deep Opens (Hafez)

Ala Ebtekar, a contemporary artist and Stanford University teacher, was born in 1978 in Berkeley, California to Iranian activist and artist parents. Ebtekar’s multicultural upbringing significantly influences his paintings, drawings, installations, and mixed media pieces. His unique style fuses Persian motifs and antiquity modern culture.

In 2014, Ala was invited to create two distant but interconnected print editions.  The concept was to use two books important to Ebtekar’s work as a foundation for each edition – not only as a conceptual foundation, but as the literal physical support for each print.  The two books are The Divan first published in 1680, a revered collection by Persian poet Hafez, born in 1315, and Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson published in 1889.

The title of the two print editions is taken from the line in Emerson’s Circles Essay written in 1841, “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”  Emerson perceived that creativity in an individual is part of a continuous, universal flow. He also spent fourteen years reading and translating Hafez, whom he called a “poet for poets.”

Ebtekar holds an MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He is the Founder and Director of Art of Social Space and Public Discourse, Stanford’s three-year global initiative that studies art and public spaces. Ebtekar’s work has been exhibited and collected by renowned institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American, Art New York, the de Young Fine Arts Museum San Francisco, CA, and the Orange County Museum of Art, CA.