Art from Iran

It is not about dreams and conflicts in the contemporary art in Iran now a days. It is rather about dreams after conflicts and conflicts as the dynamic to the ability of realizing dreams: as spiritual dynamic within the connection between Iran and the rest of the world. Many dynamic forces, that are so strong that the dictatorship of the viewer and all influences that the market could have on the art seem almost neutral and almost ineffective.

The genesis of the contemporary art of Iran goes back to the ealy 1940's. The formation of the first Iranian Art Institute in Teheran in those days shows exactly the start of a serious and systematic confrontation with the new discovery of the western art.

Some painters who are part of the modern movement are showing a new interest in the roots of the art of the iranian past.. They try to introduce again the visual and illustrative, traditioanal art of calligraphy. The presents of this stream is visible in the artwork of lots of young and talented artists, in the necessity of the viewer to find his own identity, and that what excists in the national and religious tranditional tresaure, opens the view to the tendency, to get a higher meaning of what defined the 1960's.

Today the artists of Iran know that, stagnancy, repitition, the unconscious glance that tends to look back to the past, is not a good base for a new beginning. In the world of today its movement, changes and the search for the innovation and the New that gives the base for THE Beginning and the fundamental base of life. The past of the human being should not be based on something that died or that is forever lost, but it should the root to todays individual and collctive personality.

The rich cultural and artistic inheritance of the Iran is still visible in the artwork, even if the artwork holds the new artistic tendency of the Iran: Each of them represents and symbolizes in its own way and particular language together with the effort of an whole artists generation, the dialog between the different cultures in the ealry years of the third millennium. Thank to their personal and national identity this new generation is mentaly strong enough to achieve the next step into a new world of understanding.

back...