One of Iran’s most celebrated modern artists, Bahman Mohassess was a prolific painter, sculptor, and set designer as well as a translator and theater director. Born in the Caspian region, Mohassess began studying painting as a teenager and soon thereafter joined an avant-garde movement of literary and visual artists in Tehran. He remained active there until the fall of Mosaddegh in 1953 when he moved to Rome, which remained his home for the majority of his life until his death in 2010. During the Islamic Revolution, most of the public works by Mohassess were destroyed, while the artist himself subsequently destroyed all of his remaining works in Iran. Mohassess also created collages using images from newspapers and magazines, which he referred to as assemblages. While the first of these were created as early as the 1970s, he returned to this medium increasingly in his later years, often taking up the same themes as his paintings and sculptures; five such assemblages are included in LACMA’s permanent collection.

In this collage, a woman wearing a chador sits on the carpeted floor of a mosque or shrine, where light filtering through holes in the domed ceiling lends a serene and dream-like quality to the scene. Mohassess’s paintings and sculptures tend to focus on a single figure, who often represents some sort of hybrid creature. By pushing organic forms beyond recognition or anthropomorphizing non-human elements, his subjects toe the line between mythical and real, or between human and animal. While the theme of a woman in a chador is less common to his work, the play on shapes that defies the viewer’s expectations continues here, when what appears as her silhouette turns out to be an inanimate object—a green leaf.