From New York to Tehran / Tehran to New York

There’s a rumor that Picasso studied African masks and sculptures for years to create one of his most famous works, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, in 1907. That when Henri Matisse was painting The Dessert: Harmony in Red (The Red Room) in 1908, he was captivated by arabesques in Iranian paintings or when Marc Chagall was doing large-scale paintings in Paris, he was thinking of the Yiddish myths of his childhood. It’s also said that for creating the greatest consolidated edifice in Persepolis, Achaemenian kings invited many architects, stonemasons and artists of their subservient nations to parade the splendor and stateliness of their awesome kingdom to these same subservient nations.

Art has never known a boundary. Even in the middle of wars, visual motifs, stencils, colors or styles have slipped through artists’ hands to reach their cronies’ works in enemy lands. It’s believed that artists are the children who never say goodbye to their childhood because all of them are doing the same job which adults call art, and they call recreation.

This gallery is an exchange of art between Tehran and New York. The works of 33 New Yorker artists and those of 3 Iranian artists will be represented simultaneously in Tehran and New York since all of them are doing the same thing. The artists won’t be present in none of these galleries for it’s the works and figures that will speak and show how a ball has accidently and desultorily fallen from a neighbor’s yard into ours.

Written by Hafiz Rouhani