Hope, beauty, love and sorrow – all this has been combined in Iranian poetry for thousands of years. Right up to the present, the country’s borders, society and culture have undergone repeated change, so that its artistic and cultural scene is particularly diverse. The “Solace of Lovers” exhibition brings to the Tyrol outstanding works by seven Iranian artists and personal mementos from Iran.
In the middle of the 19th century, when the Tyrolean Albert Joseph Gasteiger Khan (1823-1890) travelled to Persia as a diplomat, engineer and researcher, the country was quite different from today’s Iran: He was in the service of the Shah, who was a major supporter of modernising and westernising in Iran. It was only after Gasteiger returned to Austria that the new Shah signed the constitution and democratic reforms began in Iran. As much as the country has changed in the past century, to some extent it is still the same world that Persian poets and thinkers described thousands of years ago. With selected works of modern and contemporary art, the exhibition shows how the Iranian art scene has established itself to this day.
The exhibition features works by Mazdak Ayari, Reza Bangiz, Nargess Hashemi, Farah Ossouli, Tarlan Rafiee, Jazeh Tabatabai and Parviz Tanavoli as well as personal mementos of Albert Joseph Gasteiger Khan, which he brought from Persia to the Tyrol in the 19th century.
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