There is a small group of artists who experience creative expression as an obsession that absorbs every aspect of public and private life. A necessity that becomes a principle for developing a language that is parallel but not always intersecting with the reality of things.
Born in Rasht in Iran in 1931 to a large family of Lehijan landowners who traded in tea and silk, he was descended from Mongols on his father’s side and Qajars on his mother’s side.
When he moved to Tehran, he attended the Faculty of Fine Arts, participated in avant-garde circles such as the Anjoman-e Khorous Jangi founded by Jalil Ziapour, and formed a close friendship with Nima Yooshij, considered to be the father of contemporary Persian poetry. He completed his education in 1954 when he arrived in Italy to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.
Revered in his homeland by the cultural elite as a national icon, he was later censored by the Khomeinist regime both for his always lucid and counter-current thinking and for his homosexuality lived with fierce pride.
Bahman Mohasses’ art has been a marvellous passepartout for the 20th century to get to know the millenary fascination of Persian culture through the infinite aspects of his kaleidoscopic personality.
His torments are translated in painting as in sculpture in the depiction of the mythical Minotaurs and in creatures coming out of abyssal nightmares that render words mute, so reminiscent of Picasso’s paintings of the 1930s, for their ability to be ambiguous presences embedded in the spectator’s soul.
In the forthcoming Milan auction of Modern and Contemporary Art on 5 July 2022, two works by the Iranian artist will be auctioned. The first is a 1981 oil on cardboard canvas entitled “Untitled” (lot 10, estimate €28,000 – €32,000), the second is a 1979 bronze sculpture depicting “Leda and the Swan” (lot 11, estimate €8,000 – €12,000).
