Ab-Anbar Gallery is pleased to present Rome–Tehran: Parallel Avantgardes, a group exhibition co-curated by Salman Matinfar and Piero Tomassoni. The show brings together ten artists from Italy and Iran who worked as contemporaries in Rome during the 1950s through the 1970s. Afro, Alberto Burri, Luigi Boille, Carla Accardi, Mirko, Bahman Mohassess, Behjat Sadr, Parviz Tanavoli, Marcos Grigorian, and Mohsen Vaziri‑Moghaddam are presented in dialogue to argue that distinct avantgardes developed in relational contemporaneity, each responding to the crisis of inherited form from different historical positions.
Between the 1950s and 1970s, dialogues and exchanges between Italy and Iran heightened. Despite their different trajectories, one marked by the aftermath of totalitarianism and war, the other by foreign intervention and internal repression, both societies experienced a shared condition of historical fracture, in which the promises of modernity appeared compromised and politics increasingly unreliable. The comparison suggests that modernity, when experienced as rupture rather than progress, generates recurrent emotional and perceptual states across separate geographies: a sense of loss, estrangement, and the urgent need to reinvent meaning. In this sense, the dialogue between Italy and Iran in the 1950s exposes post-war experimentalism of Europe after the Second World War not as a Western narrative exported elsewhere, but as a shared human condition, a way of confronting the fragility of political ideals, the instability of identity, and the persistent desire to rebuild forms of expression when established structures of meaning have collapsed.
During the 1950s, many Iranian artists spent their formative years in Rome, a city that functioned as a laboratory of aesthetic and political experimentation, while attracting some of the most influential Italian and American artists and intellectuals of the era. The city’s studios, galleries, and institutions created the conditions for an exchange that was lateral rather than hierarchical. Yet, the exhibition moves beyond the European avant-garde canon by foregrounding the Iranian artists’ construction of new institutional frameworks and their transformation of modernist vocabularies on their own terms. The Iranian participation in the Venice Biennale in 1956 and 1958 placed these artists within the same critical framework as their Italian counterparts. At the same time, Grigorian’s founding of the first Tehran Biennial in 1958 established the city as a generative centre in its own right, within an international network. Upon returning to Iran, Vaziri‑Moghaddam and Sadr contributed to reshaping art education through their work at the University of Tehran, shifting its pedagogy from classical reproduction toward material experimentation.
The exhibition treats ‘avantgarde’ as a contested, polysemic term requiring active examination. It frames this inquiry through three articulations: as formal rupture, in the shared turn from representation toward materiality and process; as institutional critique; and as cultural translation, specific to the Iranian context, where reworking the languages of international modernism was itself a radical act. The exchanges between Rome and Tehran in the 1950s and 1970s produced institutional frameworks, pedagogical models, and artistic practices whose consequences shaped the trajectory of modernism beyond Europe — and whose full significance remains underwritten in the historical record.
The exhibition is produced in collaboration with Artvisor. We are grateful to the Fondazione Afro Basaldella, Archivio Luigi Boille, Bahman Mohassess Estate, Behjat Sadr Estate, Tanavoli Family, Fondazione Mohsen Vaziri-Moghaddam, as well as the lending private collections and galleries whose generous support has made this exhibition possible.