Over the past five decades, artist Fereydoun Ave has assembled a singular collection of modern and contemporary Iranian art inflected by personal history, friendship, sensibility, and circumstance. On returning to Iran in 1970 after years of education abroad, Ave worked as a curator and designer at Tehran’s Iran-America Society Cultural Center, where he organized groundbreaking exhibitions of both Iranian and international artists. Around the same time, he began collecting art with money borrowed from his grandmother. He continued to collect over the years, while he moved on to positions at consequential Tehran arts institutions, including the avant-garde Theater Workshop (Kargah-e Namayesh), where he worked as a designer, and the Zand Gallery, where he served as artistic director.
After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Ave stayed behind as droves of his compatriots left the country. In the early 1980s, he launched 13 Vanak, an independent art space for emerging Iranian artists in a disused garden shed in an iconic Tehran square. The nimble and irreverent exhibitions at 13 Vanak attracted diverse audiences, including, on occasion, befuddled agents of the state. Though 13 Vanak closed in 2009, Ave has continued to mentor successive generations of artists both in and outside Iran.
The works on display belong, roughly, to three epochs: the late Pahlavi period, the early revolutionary era, and the last 20 years. Yet these artworks defy tidy periodization and evade standard narratives of rupture around the 1979 Revolution. The relationship between art and life, like history, is messy, impossible to tame. Ave, who is an accomplished artist himself, serves as both subject and cipher of this presentation, a vantage onto the fascinating—and contested—cultural history of 20th- and 21st-century Iran.
Laal Collection presentation is curated by Negar Azimi and Sohrab Mohebbi.
This presentation features works by: Ali Golastaneh, Arash Hanaei, Ardeshir Mohasses, Ashur- banipal Babilla, Behjat Sadr, Bijan Saffari, Bita Fayyazi, Davood Emdadian, Farhad Moshiri, Haydeh Ayazi, Hossein-Ali Zabehi, Houman Mortazavi, Iman Raad, Khosrow Hasanzadeh, Leyly Matine-Daftary, Mamali Shafahi, Manoucher Yektai, Monir Sharoudy Farmanfarmaian, Mostafa Sarabi, Nazgol Ansarinia, Nikzad Nodjoumi, Parvaneh Etemadi, Raana Farnoud, Ramin Haer- izadeh, Reza Shafahi, Rokni Haerizadeh, Sadra Baniasadi, Shahab Fotouhi, Shideh Tami, Shirin Aliabadi, Sirak Melkonian, Yaghoub Amaemehpich, Yashar Samimi Mofakham.
The curators would like to thank those who helped make this presentation possible: Aria Kasaei, Ali Bakhtiari, Rochanak Etemadi, Omid Bonakdar, Shaqayeq Arabi, Hormoz Hematian, Alireza Fatehi, Balice Hertling Gallery, Dastan Gallery, Farhad Moshiri, Sohrab Mahdavi, and Roya Khadjavi-Heidari.
