Parviz Tanavoli: Poets, Locks, Cages

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Parviz Tanavoli, "Poet in Love with Bird," 1961

bronze on wood base, Collection of Grey Art Gallery, NYU, Gift of Abby Weed Grey, Photo: Kevin Noble, Courtesy Grey Art Gallery, NYU.

Parviz Tanavoli: Poets, Locks, Cages is the first major Canadian exhibition of works by the Iranian-born, Vancouver-based artist Parviz Tanavoli. Internationally celebrated, Tanavoli has lived in Vancouver for over thirty years while also maintaining a studio in Iran.

The exhibition brings together over 100 major works—representing his six decade career—and spans the full breadth of his practice from sculpture and painting to printmaking and mixed-media assemblages. Tanavoli is among the foremost contemporary Iranian artists. He belongs to the Saqqakhana School, which emerged in the early 1960s in Iran, and has been influenced heavily by his country’s history, culture and traditions.

Iranian cultural practices underwent a transformation in the mid-twentieth century, which divided the art community into those who embraced a national artistic identity and those who were heavily influenced by Westernization. Artists began reconceiving folk culture, Persian traditional motifs and Islamic iconography at a time of increasing global consciousness and technological development, forging a link between heritage and progress. Tanavoli—who has been widely recognized as the only Iranian artist to fully capture the duality and interplay of Iran’s pre-Islam and Islamic cultural identities created a visual symbology through his sculptural work that would have a lasting impact on modernism in Iran.

Parviz Tanavoli: Poets, Locks, Cages examines the layering of both sacred and secular histories in Tanavoli’s work—an integration that is crucial to understanding the development of modern sculpture in Iran.