Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, an Iranian artist whose mirror-encrusted geometric compositions drew on both Islamic architecture and the abstractions of the postwar New York avant-garde, died on April 20 in Tehran. She was 96.

The death was confirmed by a grandson, Aziz Isham.

Ms. Farmanfarmaian (pronounced far-mahn-far-MY-ahn) emerged as a key actor in the worldwide development of abstract art in recent years, as curators of American and European museums began to map a global history of postwar painting and sculpture.

Her art ranged from decorous early floral painting to stern, memory-haunted collages. But her most compelling works were polygonal wooden forms, sometimes free-standing and sometimes mounted on the wall, that were covered in thousands of precisely cut small mirrors. She made her first such work in 1969, and soon was producing hexagon-shaped reliefs festooned with mirrors that fractured viewers’ reflections into uncanny multiples.