Poet VII, 2011
Parviz Tanavoli (b. 1937, Tehran, Iran) is a well-known Iranian contemporary artists whose work has gained attention beyond Sculpture – his specialized medium – across a variety of disciplines. HIs collection of various Iranian artifacts has influenced many of his work and those of his students and researchers. He graduated from the Brera Academy of Milan (1959). He taught sculpting at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (1960) and the Tehran College of Decorative Arts (1961-1963). He was the head of sculpting department at the University of Tehran, a position he held for 18 years until 1979, when he retired from his teaching duties. Since 1989 he has lived and worked both in Tehran and Vancouver, Canada. His latest solo exhibition, "Oh Nightingale" (2019) was held at the West Vancouver Art Museum. Parviz Tanavoli's is considered a leading figure in "Saqakhaneh", an artistic movement to which many Iranian contemporary artists of the 1970s adhered, using artifacts, designs, and motifs belonging to popular artforms in Iran to speak to contemporary issues. Sculptures of Tanavoli are rife with objects and forms detached from their original context and given a new sense, most famous among these his iconic "Heech" sculptures. Meaning "nothingness" in Persian, "heech" has a cosmological history whose calligraphic form takes its viewers into a meandering world of contemplation. Heech was also a commentary on the evolution of contemporary art in Iran, a response to the growing tendency of visual artists of the 70s to follow trends in Western art by borrowing from their own traditions of image-making. Tanavoli's collection of Iranian artifacts is part of his artistic discourse. Through collection, which has spanned over five decades, he has studied the ways artisans in the Iranian plateau interacted with their environment. He published many books detailing his collections and held a major exhibition at Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art ("Parviz Tanavoli and the Lions of Iran", 2017) in which he placed his own paintings and sculptures next to rugs, jewelry, locks, water-fountains, and designs bearing the mark of a lion. As such, Tanavoli has a central place in the visual history of Iran, to which he has devoted his life and creative input.