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 of these assemblages are included in LACMA’s permanent collection.

For decades, birds constituted a common theme in the work of Mohassess, who depicted similar types of fowls in familiar positions across various media. Here, he returns to the subject with a cut-out of a black bird that stands looming over an arid landscape and green body of water. The bird’s long torso and pointed, almost sickle-like beak, as well as the metallic sheen of its coloring, are reminiscent of the artist’s better-known bronze sculptures of birds, only a few of which have survived.