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. Carla Accardi, Afro, Luigi Boille, Alberto Burri, Mirko, Bahman Mohasses, Behjat Sadr, Parviz Tanavoli, Marcos Grigorian, and Mohsen Vaziri‑Moghaddam are presented in dialogue to argue that distinct avant-gardes developed in relational contemporaneity, each responding to the crisis of inherited form from different historical positions.
The exhibition treats avant-garde 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. What unites the works on view is a shared crisis of the pictorial surface, arrived at through structurally analogous but historically distinct pressures.
During the 50s, many Iranian artists spent their formative years in Rome, a city that functioned as a laboratory of aesthetic and political experimentation. The city's studios, galleries, and institutions created the conditions for an exchange that was lateral rather than hierarchical. Yet, the exhibition decentralises modernism and 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. Iranian participation in the Venice Biennale in 1956 and 1958 placed these artists within the same critical framework as their Italian counterparts. Grigorian's founding of the first Tehran Biennial in 1958 established the city as a generative centre within an international network. Upon returning to Iran, Vaziri‑Moghaddam and Sadr reshaped art education at the University of Tehran, shifting its pedagogy from classical reproduction toward material experimentation.
The avant-garde belongs to no single geography, no single canon, no single history. 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; while its full significance remains underwritten in the historical record.