Parviz Tanavoli: Oh Nightingale

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Parviz Tanavoli, "Love Nightingale," 2013

digital print on paper (limited edition), 90.0 x 75.0 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Opening Reception: Tuesday, July 23 from 7 to 9 p.m.

Curator’s Tour: Thursday, July 25 at 1:30 p.m. and Saturday, September 14 at 2 p.m.

About the exhibition

“My cages are homes of hopes. And I put a lot of things in the cages. It’s the opposite of what some people think: I do not consider what I put in cages imprisoned, but preserved, made safe.”

– Parviz Tanavoli, 1976

The West Vancouver Art Museum is delighted to present this exhibition of work by the eminent Iranian-Canadian artist Parviz Tanavoli. A resident of West Vancouver for three decades, Tanavoli is among Canada’s most significant contemporary artists. This exhibition will feature work that spans his six-decade-long career, focusing on his jewelry, wearable art and small sculptures, as well as prints and paintings of birds, cages and locks. The artist has returned repeatedly to these forms, allowing him to explore the themes of freedom, nothingness, poetry and history, while playing with his viewer’s awareness of traditional function and meaning. Just as he subverts the accepted meaning of a cage, he explores dualisms that manifest themselves as both significant and trivial, acting as a poet contrasting the everyday with the remarkable.

Tanavoli’s work has been presented around the world and has been featured recently in exhibitions at The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The British Museum, Asia Society and Grey Art Gallery at New York University. His work is held in numerous public and private collections, including Tate Modern and The British Museum, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Art and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran; Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar; Aga Khan Museum, Toronto; Ludwig Museum, Aachen; Royal Society of Fine Arts, Amman; and Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi.