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His work, "veiled woman", won the first prize of the very first tehran biennal in 1958. he has explored local idioms and nuances, and his portrayal on these flat washes of colour of a woman emerging from a bathhouse in downtown tehran, looking at you sideways, really exemplifies the kind of exploration that artists were interested in doing then. the incredible thing is that there is this misnomer in western art history that modernism was something that was invented in the west, and then exported like a good around the world. whereas, in fact, in the kind of transnational modernisms that are be...

Islamicists, republicans, all working within this field and giving their own voice. so we wanted to represent that dynamic period of modernism, when iranian artists were really exploring different ways of expressing their own modernity. we have oil paintings, and sculpture, and photography. we have film, installation work, and animation. and over half our artists are women, so really creating a very dynamic voice. within the era of modernism, it's interesting to look at some of those key artists, all of whom are iconic today. so we can look at someone like sirak melkonian —

In the exhibition shows the harem of an important person. they are having tea on a balcony overlooking a park with very large trees. the portraits of the women — their faces have an incredible stillness. i think what's happened is that isma'iljalayir wouldn't have had access, and so he's been given photographs of them in order to create the painting. that sort of leads us through to the 20th century — and there, we show examples of the art of iran after the introduction of art school training in the western—style in the 19405, and how iran in the 19605 and '705 developed a form of modern...

The story differently. and it's great to have this moment to establish the huge variety of modernism within iran in the 20th century. iran positioned itself firmly on the global stage — so we had artists that moved westward and looked, and reinvented, but we also had artists who looked eastward. and who more beautiful and more moving than sohrab sepehri, who's known as a poet, as well as a painter? sohrab studied for two years injapan in the early �*60s, and also in china. and he came back to iran via india, where he studied there as well — both in its painterly arts, but also in its spi...

The painting that we have in the exhibition shows the harem of an important person. they are having tea on a balcony overlooking a park with very large trees. the portraits of the women — their faces have an incredible stillness. i think what's happened is that isma'iljalayir wouldn't have had access, and so he's been given photographs of them in order to create the painting. that sort of leads us through to the 20th century — and there, we show examples of the art of iran after the introduction of art school training in the western—style in the 1940s, and how iran in the 1960s and '70s ...