Parviz Tanavoli

Parviz Tanavoli (born 1937) is an Iranian sculptor, painter, educator, and art historian.

He is a pioneer within the Saqqakhaneh school, a neo-traditionalist art movement.

Tanavoli has been one of the most expensive Iranian artists in sales.

Tanavoli series of sculpture work Heech are displayed in prestigious museums and public places, such as the British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hamline University, Aga Khan Museum, and as public art in the city of Vancouver.

Additionally Tanavoli has written extensively on this history of Persian art and Persian crafts.

Parviz Tanavoli was born 24 March 1937 in Tehran.

In 1952, he started his education at the Tehran School of Fine Arts (now part of the University of Tehran).

He continued his studies in Italy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara (Italian: Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara) in 1956 to 1957; as well as at Brera Academy (Italian: Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera) in Milan from 1958 to 1959.

He studied under sculptor Mariano Marini.

Upon graduating from the Brera Academy in 1959, he returned to Iran in 1960 and taught sculpting at the College of Decorative Arts in Tehran.

From February 1961 to 1964, Tanavoli taught sculpture for three years at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, as a guest of art collector Abby Grey.

In addition to his tenure as a sculpture professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 1961 to 1964 and his 18-year directorship of the sculpture department at Tehran University, Tanavoli has continued to teach and mentor young artists.

Tanavoli's newest "heeches" exhibition, titled "All and Nothing," was held at Tehran's Art Space Gallery from July 6 to August 3, 2022.

The exhibition showcased the works of 40 of his students and his own newest "heeches," which are among his most recognized works.

He belongs to the Saqqakhaneh group of artists who share a common popular aesthetic, according to the scholar Karim Emami.

He has been influenced heavily by his country's history and culture, and traditions and has always been fascinated with locksmithing.

Tanavoli was once a cultural advisor to the Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi.

Tanavoli is known for his heeches, three-dimensional representations of the Persian word for 'nothing', heech.

Composed of three Persian characters in the style of nasta'liq, the three letters he, ye and če are combined to produce the word heech.

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In 1967, Tanavoli, Kamran Diba, and Roxana Saba (daughter of Abolhasan Saba) founded the Rasht 29 Club on a northern street near the Amirkabir University of Technology (formerly the Tehran Polytechnic).

Rasht 29 Club was named after the street address, and it was a popular hangout amongst artists of the time including Marcos Grigorian, Hossein Zenderoudi, Sadegh Tabrizi, Faramarz Pilaram, Sohrab Sepehri, Massoud Arabshahi, Yadollah Royai, Nader Naderpour, Reza Baraheni, Esmail Shahroudi, Ahmadreza Ahmadi, Bijan Elahi, Ebrahim Golestan, Hageer Daruish, Kamran Shirdel, Sadeq Chubak, Karl Schlamminger, and others.

Tanavoli's work has been auctioned worldwide, leading to over $9 million in overall sales, making him the most expensive living Iranian artist.

He then returned to Iran and assumed the directorship of the sculpture department at the Tehran University (now University of Tehran), a position he held for 18 years until 1979 when he retired from his teaching duties.

Since 1989, Tanavoli has held dual nationality and has lived and worked both in Tehran, and Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver, British Columbia.

In 2003, Tanavoli turned his Tehran house into the "Museum of Parviz Tanavoli," showcasing his personal art collection, which was only open for a few months due to political issues in Iran.

In 2003 he had a major retrospective at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

Prior to that he had held solo exhibitions in Austria, Italy, Germany, United States and Britain.

Tanavoli has been in group exhibitions internationally.

His work has been displayed at the Tate Modern, British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Grey Art Gallery - New York University, the Isfahan City Center, Nelson Rockefeller Collection, New York, Olympic Park, Seoul, South Korea, the Royal Museum of Jordan, the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Hamline University, St. Paul and Shiraz University, Iran.

In 2005, he created a small piece of sculpture called Heech in a Cage to protest the conditions of the American-held prisoners at Guantanamo Bay detainment camp and in 2006, began work on his piece to honor the victims of the Israeli-Lebanon war.

In 2008, his work, The Wall (Oh Persepolis), an almost 2-meter tall bronze sculpture covered in incomprehensible hieroglyphs fetched USD 2.84 million at a Dubai Christie's sale, which was an auction record for an artist of Middle Eastern origins.

The most recent solo exhibition of Parviz Tanavoli, "Parviz Tanavoli: Poets, Locks, Cages", took place from July 1, 2023, to November 19, 2023, showcasing a comprehensive range of his works spanning six decades.

This exhibition, held at Vancouver Art Gallery, provided a thorough retrospective of his career.

In 2015, after four decades, Davis Museum at Wellesley College organized the first solo exhibition of Tanavoli's work in the US.

In 2015, the biographical documentary film, Parviz Tanavoli: Poetry in Bronze, was released.

A day before Tanavoli was due to speak at the British Museum in 2016, authorities in Iran confiscated his passport, preventing him from leaving the country, accusing him of "disturbing the public peace".

Tanavoli explained that "I have not done anything wrong. I spent the whole day at the passport office, but no one told me anything, nor did anyone at the airport. I'm not a political person, I'm merely an artist."

Before that, he had another solo exhibition in 2017 at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art based on his Lions works and Lion collection.

Prior to this, his solo exhibition was in 2019 at the West Vancouver Art Museum entitled "Oh Nightingale".