Fereydoun Ave

Overview

"I started reading the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, after the revolution. I guess I was desperately looking for something I could relate to. I wasn’t a Muslim, so I couldn’t identify with the Islamic side. I was not a Republican, so I couldn’t identify with the Republic. I had to find something that I could identify with, and I suppose that ended up being ancient Iranian mythology." Fereydoun Ave, in an interview with the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Fereydoun Ave (b. 1945, Tehran) is an influential Iranian artist, curator, and cultural figure whose multifaceted practice spans painting, collage, photography, assemblage, textiles, set design, and curatorial work. Educated in England and the United States, Ave earned a BA in Applied Arts for Theatre from Arizona State University and studied film at NYU before returning to Tehran in 1970, just as the city’s cultural scene was flourishing.

His work moves fluidly between abstraction and figuration, rooted in mythology, history, and the personal. Ave draws on a wide range of references—from Iranian wrestling and heroes of the 10th-century Shahnameh, to Greek mythology and contemporary allegory. “I’m a collage myself,” he once said, capturing the essence of an artistic language where painterly gestures, repetition, calligraphic lines, and found objects all coexist.

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