Lajevardi Foundation and O Gallery are pleased to announce the first survey exhibition of 40 years of work by Ali Nassir (b. 1951, Tehran), a pioneering artist whose powerful paintings have made unique creative contributions to contemporary Iranian art.
The upcoming exhibition will be on display in two parts in O Gallery and Lajevardi Foundation from June 23 to July 21, 2023. O Gallery will focus on showcasing recent works by the artist while Lajevardi Foundation will showcase the artist’s works created between 1980 and 2020 as well as never before exhibited pieces in Iran. A more comprehensive retrospective, co-curated by Hoda Arbabi and Orkideh Daroodi, was originally set to open in TMOCA in the Fall of 2022 but was canceled due to the artist’s and both curators’ mutual decision. Ali Nassir was born in 1950 in the neighborhoods near Tehran Bazaar; He left for Europe at the age of 23 and eventually chose Berlin to reside in. Coinciding with Nassir’s studies, Tehran and Berlin were the bearers of some of the most important events of the 20th century. Tehran, which Nassir experienced in his early youth, a city with high social mobility and class movements, was constantly transforming, and in the following years went towards a great revolution.
On the other hand, Berlin was a segregated city and perhaps the most acute epicenter of the Cold War crisis at Nassir’s arrival; a city surrounded by concrete walls separating the conflicting poles around it. During this time, many artists were attracted to this city's secluded and abandoned spaces; in the shadow of the walls, art centers thrived; but the walls eventually collapsed unexpectedly to mark the end of an era.
What we enumerated from the social atmosphere was to point to environments with high and polarized dynamism, and the fundamental and rapid changes that Nassir has witnessed at key phases of his life. Having this social background in mind is a clue to enter the world of his images, which are full of movement, excitement, and surprise, and in their hidden layers, they carry the experience of an unstable institution, tangled with the rapid changes of the era.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a major publication featuring texts from Dorothee Bauerle-Willert and Hoda Arbabi and the screening of “Untitled”, a 43 minutes’ documentary made by Siavash Eidani, Haleh Ghorbani.